Two deputies for President-elect Joe Biden are urging migrants not to rush the U.S. border, saying officials will soon offer various legal routes for migrants to get into U.S. workplaces and communities.
“Individuals should not believe those who are pushing the idea that they must come to the United States right now,” Jake Sullivan, the expected National Security Advisor, told EFE, a Spanish-language wire service that is widely read in Latin American countries. “We need time to increase processing capacity and to do so consistent with public health requirements.”
“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on Day 1,” said Susan Rice, who is expected to be Biden’s top domestic policy chief. “It will take months to develop the capacity that we will need to reopen fully.”
Neither official suggested any migrants would be rejected by their proposed “establishing a fair, humane, and orderly immigration system.”
President Donald Trump is denying asylum to migrants “rather than helping create alternative pathways to protection,” said Sullivan. “That is just not who we are as a country.”
The appeals for patience comes after Biden’s campaign trail rhetoric promised to welcome many poor migrants — even though millions of people in Central and Latin America have declared they would like to migrate into Americans’ jobs and neighborhoods. In 2018, Gallup reported:
In Gallup’s most recent global estimate, between 2015 and 2017, 15% of the world’s adults — more than 750 million people — said they would like to move to another country permanently if they could. In Central America, this percentage is one in three (33%), or about 10 million adults.
Three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S. This includes 16% of adults from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica, which translates into nearly 5 million people.
The comments by Sullivan and Rice outlined some ways the Biden administration may use to minimize the political reaction they deliver many poor and unskilled foreign migrants into Americans’ jobs and rental markets, despite the recent economic chaos caused by China’s coronavirus.
“We will expand lawful pathways for migration, allowing people to apply for refugee resettlement and temporary worker and other employment-based programs from within the region,” Rice said.
“We also will make it easier for [foreign] people to reunite with their families in the United States [although] many should be able to seek safety much closer to home,” she said.
“We will rethink asylum processing to make it more efficient and fair, enabling asylum officers to adjudicate claims so asylum seekers aren’t tied up in court proceedings for years,” she said.
That plan would allow migrants to win asylum — which means the huge prize of life in wealthy America for them and all of their children — by asking asylum officers in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. If denied by the asylum officers, the migrants could still take the longer route through the courts.
The officials also said they would eventually cancel asylum deals with Central American countries and eliminate the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” which prevent migrants from getting U.S. jobs while asylum judges consider their asylum claims by keeping the migrants in Mexico.
The administration also plans to reward prior migrants with the huge prize of citizenship, said Rice. “That [2021 immigration ] bill will provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented individuals, as well as critically needed reforms of our broken immigration system,” she said.
Rice and Sullivan did not say how many new migrants they would welcome through the new legal avenues and the streamlined asylum process.
That uncertainty pressures potential migrants to rush up to the border if Biden tightens border rules in 2022, as President Donald Trump dramatically did in 2019. Median household wages for Americans rose by 7 percent in 219 as Trump forced employers to compete for American workers instead of hiring new migrants.
Both Biden officials also promised more aid to the region — but if they leave the U.S. border open, then the locals will rationally use the foreign aid to migrate northwards in the hope of winning the big prize of asylum.
Rice said:
We recognize that the longer-term solution for sustainably reducing migration in the region is to work with civil society, the private sector, governments, and international partners to address the underlying causes of migration. As part of this, we aim to implement a $4 billion, 4-year plan to confront corruption, enhance security, and foster prosperity in migrant-sending communities while ensuring these countries are investing in themselves.
On December 12, USA Today wrote up the story of a Guatemalan migrant who missed getting into the United States by just a few months:
“I told her, ‘Listen, lately the U.S. government is giving children priority,” reminding his wife that her own brother had reached the U.S. with a son a few months before. “Immigration visits him twice a week. But they let him work in peace!”
[…]
When [Francisco] Sical and his daughter reached the El Paso border on May 31, 2019, after a 20-day journey north and five days detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, their fate was spelled out in English on paperwork handed them by a border agent:
“You are an immigrant not in possession of a valid unexpired immigrant visa, reentry permit, border crossing card or other valid entry document required by the Immigration and Nationality Act.” The papers assigned father and daughter an “alien” number, used by the U.S. government to track immigrants, and listed an appointment to appear before a U.S. immigration judge at 8:30 a.m., on July 23, 2019, at the courthouse in Downtown El Paso.
Sical is now back in Guatemala, where he must find a way to repay the “microcredit” bank loan he used to pay his coyote.
The loan is mortgaged to his house, so he may lose his family’s house because he was lured towards the border loopholes created by Democrats and progressive judges.
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