Here are Biden’s plans on immigration
How the Biden administration will move on immigration according to the New York Times
Biden aims to rebuild and expand legal immigration
If President Biden succeeds, it will soon be much easier to immigrate to the United States. There will be shorter and simpler forms and applicants will have to jump through fewer security circles. Foreigners will have better opportunities to join their families and more opportunities to secure work visas.
A 46-page draft obtained by the New York Times outlines the Biden administration's plans to significantly expand the legal immigration system, including methodically reversing former President Donald J. Trump's efforts to dismantle it, which reduced the flow of workers. foreigners, families and refugees, erecting procedural barriers more difficult to cross than its "great, beautiful wall".
Due to Mr. Trump's immigration policies, the average time it takes to approve employer-sponsored green cards has doubled. The backlog for citizenship applications has increased by 80% since 2014, to more than 900,000 cases. Approval of the U-visa program, which grants legal status to immigrants willing to help the police, has gone from five months to about five years.
In nearly all cases over the past four years, immigrating to the United States has become more difficult, more expensive, and more time-consuming.
And while Mr. Biden made it clear during his presidential campaign that he intended to unravel much of his predecessor's immigration legacy, the project offers new details on how far-reaching the effort will be – not just to reverse Mr. Trump's policies. but to address the backlogs and delays that have plagued previous presidents.
The project, dated May 3 and titled "DHS Plan to Restore Trust in Our Legal Immigration System," lists dozens of initiatives aimed at reopening the country to more immigrants, fulfilling the president's promise to ensure America embraces its “character as a nation of opportunity and hospitality”.
"There are significant changes that need to be made to truly open all avenues of legal immigration," said Felicia Escobar Carrillo, the chief of staff at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, of efforts to reverse Trump's agenda. "In the same way that they have taken a wide-ranging approach to closing the roads, I think we want to take a wide-ranging approach to opening the legal roads that have always been available, but that they have tried to put roadblocks on."
Since taking office four months ago, Biden has struggled with a historic migration wave of Central American children and teenagers that has prompted some Republicans to accuse the president of opening the nation's borders to people trying to enter the country illegally, a 'accusation that the White House rejects.
Indeed, Biden wants to open the country to more immigrants. Its ambition, as reflected in the project, is to rebuild and expand the opportunities for foreigners to enter the United States – but to do so legally.
Divided into seven sections, the document offers detailed policy proposals that would help more foreigners move to the United States, including highly skilled workers, victims of trafficking, families of Americans living abroad, American Indians born in Canada. , refugees, asylum seekers and agricultural workers. Immigrants applying online could pay less tax or even secure a waiver in an effort to "reduce the barriers" to immigration. And the regulations would be revised to "encourage the full participation of immigrants in our civil life".
Even with a more restrictive and slower immigration system, around 1 million people obtained green cards in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. Most had been waiting for years. In the past year of the Obama administration, 1.2 million people have received green cards.
But if Biden does everything in the document, it will have gone beyond simply reversing the downward trend. It will have significantly increased the opportunities for foreigners from around the world to come to the United States, embracing robust immigration even as a divisive, decades-long political debate continues to rage over such a policy.
Most of the changes could be put into practice without passing Biden's proposed revision of the nation's immigration laws, which would provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people living in the United States, but has stalled in. a bitterly divided Congress. While polls show that most Americans support an increase in immigration, many Republican voters have enthusiastically supported Trump's more restrictive policies.
White House officials declined to comment directly on the Department of Homeland Security project, saying those documents go through many drafts and that decisions on specific steps to address legal immigration remain evolving. But they said the president remains committed to significantly reducing the restrictions imposed by his predecessor.
This effort will take time and has not yet caught public attention like the wave of southwest border crossings. But conservative activists who for years have been calling for lower levels of legal immigration are promising a fight to stop Biden and get a political price for his shares.
"They just want to shovel people in here," said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general who served as acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services under Trump. "They are not running an immigration system for the benefit of America, and certainly not for the benefit of ordinary Americans." "
Most research has shown that legal immigration to the United States has benefits for the country's economy, especially at a time when the country's population growth is slowing. But Mr. Cuccinelli and others who favor severe immigration restrictions say it's obvious to them that letting foreigners compete for jobs – especially when the country is still recovering from an economic downturn like the one created by the pandemic – will do hurt the prospects of American citizens.
“The number one job for immigration services is to make sure immigration doesn't harm Americans,” said Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, a group dedicated to much lower levels of legal immigration.
Motivated by this belief, Mr. Cuccinelli set in motion a transformation of the government's legal immigration system during the Trump administration – changing his agency from one that benefits foreigners to a "control agency," in part by issuing numerous restrictions on the offer of asylum to immigrants and seeking to raise taxes.
The increase in vetting, as well as travel restrictions imposed during the pandemic, contributed to the result the Trump administration had sought: the influx of immigrants has slowed significantly, as obtaining legal approval to enter the states United has become much more difficult.
With fewer immigrants arriving, there was less money to fund Citizenship and Immigration Services, which are supported almost entirely by the taxes paid by immigrants. Restoring the agency to full capacity is at the heart of Mr. Biden's effort to expand legal immigration, according to the paper and interviews with administration officials.
A central element of the project is addressing the backlogs in the immigration system.
The administration is planning to expedite immigration applications by expanding virtual interviews and electronic filing, as well as limiting requests for evidence from applicants. Biden asked Cass R. Sunstein, a former Obama administration official and legal scholar at Harvard Law School, to remake the immigration system to be "more effective and less burdensome" than it has been for decades. "Reducing paperwork and other administrative requirements".
Biden wants to restore opportunities for foreign workers through the current H-1B visa program, which is aimed at workers with special skills. The administration also intends to create new pathways for foreign entrepreneurs who wish to "start businesses and create jobs for US workers," according to the document.
Officials are working on a regulation that could allow migrants to obtain asylum in the United States if they are victims of domestic violence or their relatives have been persecuted. During the Trump era, Attorney General William P. Barr moved to end asylum protection for those who claimed to deserve it for these reasons.
Biden also aims to expand immigration opportunities for LGBTQ refugees from countries where they are persecuted or where same-sex marriages are not recognized.
Furthermore, he wants to renew a program that provides a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who help law enforcement by cooperating with the police or testifying in court.
The waiting list for the U-Visa program has skyrocketed, leaving crime victims and domestic abuse survivors vulnerable to perpetrators who can threaten to report them for deportation if they continue to speak to the police, said Leslye E. Orloff, director of the National Immigrant Women's Defense Project at American University.
The Biden administration is considering extending protections to cooperating immigrants even before entering the official visa waiting list, according to the document.
"They are recognizing that there is danger for these victims," Ms. Orloff said.
Critics say the Biden administration is ignoring the negative consequences of their efforts. The H-1B program has been attacked as a loophole for tech companies to import low-cost foreign workers to compete for jobs. Granting asylum to victims of domestic abuse could open the door to the acceptance of millions more people. And some Republicans say Biden shouldn't loosen control of foreigners, even as officials insist they will continue to control terrorists and other threats.
As the Biden administration pushes forward with changes, officials seem willing to use emergency rules and presidential memos to avoid the lengthy regulatory process, in the same way that Mr. Trump has put his agenda in place. But that could make Biden's immigration legacy prone to a similar reversal by a Republican president in the future.
"The question hanging over all this work is how to do it in a way that isn't so easily reversed next time," said Doug Rand, a founder of Boundless Immigration, a Seattle-based tech company that helps immigrants get green cards. and citizenship.
The change might not come soon enough for Jenn Hawk, 37, who currently lives with her Argentine husband in Poland, where he works, even though her autistic son is in the Washington area with his father.
Due to delays in processing her husband's immigration application, she is faced with a choice: to stay in Poland with the man she married, or to return to the United States alone to be with her 10-year-old son. .
Ms. Hawk applied to sponsor her husband's immigration to the United States in October 2020, spending $ 575 on the application. But they are facing a delay of more than a year and a half before they can even submit their financial and medical information, not to mention getting an interview with an immigration officer.
“I just want to go home,” Ms. Hawk said. "They seem to be doing everything in their power to limit this possibility."
(Extract from the Epr press review)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/tutti-i-piani-di-biden-sullimmigrazione/ on Mon, 07 Jun 2021 05:27:12 +0000.