Joe Biden, who has been under pressure to deal with a wave of migrants at the US-Mexico border, last week announced a broad crackdown on migrants seeking asylum, calling for the use of a controversial public health measure known as Title 42 , expands to restrict people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela from entering the US illegally, while offering those who legally seek help a new route to America.
Immigration reformers expressed dismay at the Biden administration’s plan to expand Title 42 before President Trump made his first visit to the US-Mexico border as president in 2020. As they took solace in Vice President Biden’s efforts to create a legal pathway to asylum for people from four countries.
They still believed these measures were insufficient because they excluded other migrants and because the parole program is fraught with demands that create significant barriers for migrants without access to resources, perpetuating inequality in the US immigration system.
In other words, immigration advocates argue that the benefits of increased access for refugees and a legitimate asylum route are outweighed by the costs of increased deportation of migrants under the guise of public health.
Alex Miller, director of the Immigration Justice Campaign at the American Immigration Council, said: “For many of us working in the immigration law field, there was tremendous hope at the beginning of the administration that Title 42 would end and move forward with the restoration of access to asylum.” We hoped for more.
The goal of the Biden administration’s “carrot and stick” approach is to reduce the historically large numbers of migrants entering the United States illegally and seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries.
Federal data from fiscal year 2022 shows that U.S. border agents stopped migrants more than 2 million times along the southern border, an all-time high. More than a million asylum seekers have been denied entry under Title 42.
“The difficulty is that the root isn’t widely available,” Miller said. Those who do not have the necessary nationality, funds or support to apply for parole are denied “legal access to asylum”. It’s not a fair bargain as the sticks they offer restrict access.
Under the Biden administration’s new policy, if migrants from those countries pass background checks, buy a plane ticket, receive financial sponsorship and meet other standards, they would be allowed to legally enter the “parole program.” They would be allowed to live and work in the US for two years.
However, immigration advocates are concerned about a proposed rule from the Department of Homeland Security that would make asylum seekers ineligible if they do not seek protection in a third country before reaching the US and if they “use available, established avenues to legal bypass migration”. as Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas put it last week.
This rule is similar to the “transit ban” introduced by the Trump administration. People were also concerned that the requirements of the parole program, which came about after the government’s treatment of refugees fleeing Afghanistan, Venezuela and Ukraine, would prevent entry for migrants who did not have the financial means to buy a plane ticket. pay or find a financial sponsor.
The immigrant-led rights organization United We Dream called Biden’s new policy on Twitter “a racist and classist attack on migrants”. United We Dream’s deputy director of federal advocacy, Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, said in a statement that the Biden administration’s expansion of Title 42 would harm “the very people who seek refuge and claim to protect” .
The director of border strategies of the American Civil Liberties Union, Jonathan Blazersaid in a statement that the Biden administration’s “shocking expansion of Title 42 will put more lives at great risk,” adding that his plan “links his administration to the toxic anti-immigrant policies of the Trump era rather than fair access to restore asylum protection”.
Come on. Trump’s asylum ban applied to 99.9% of people who came to the border. Biden’s asylum ban could apply to 50-90%* of people coming to the border.
That’s still a ban.
* We have not yet seen the proposed regulation, so this is speculation based on their public statements. https://t.co/KDgoqznN1x
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 7, 2023
“His commitments to those seeking refuge would ring completely hollow if he continued to trade one Trump illegal anti-asylum policy for another,” Blazer warned. According to The Guardian’s Miller, one of the administration’s latest suggestions is to allow asylum seekers to use an app in English and Spanish to make appointments.
The government claims this will “reduce wait times and crowds at the U.S. port of entry and allow for safe, orderly, and humane processing.” Miller said the effort makes the legal asylum-seeking process more difficult for migrants who lack technological access and speak native dialects beyond Spanish, as well as those who cannot get legal help to help them through the process.
Biden has stressed that Congress must pass more comprehensive immigration reform. In the meantime, the government’s new parole process, which he described as “safe, orderly” and humane, “would make things better but not completely solve the border problem.”
While the administration’s establishment of the shelter that will allow 30,000 people to enter is better than nothing, the center’s vice president of law and policy said, Lisa Graybilltold the Guardian the government’s overall approach reflects immigration enforcement and the creation of asylum opportunities as a “zero-sum game”.
She noted that it was a common blunder for presidents and politicians. She added that Biden had followed “an outdated script that doesn’t work” by focusing resources on enforcement rather than building a “humane and orderly processing system structured around recognizing the right to asylum rather than abuse”.
Instead, the parole program as designed will harm poor migrants and those who have fled their countries in a hurry without meeting all requirements, even hindering those who have legitimate claims for asylum while helping middle- and upper-income migrants with access to resources.
Angela Kelley, the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s chief policy and partnerships adviser, called Biden’s development of the parole program “smart” and an example of how he was trying to “grab the tools in his toolbox and use them in more creative ways.”
She noted that efforts have been made under the Biden administration to quadruple the number of resettled Latin American and Caribbean asylum seekers. She went on to say those escaping climate change-related disasters qualify for refuge, but the United States’ outdated immigration rules have not kept up with the times.
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