Joe Biden’s migration program is angering even those in his own camp, because in the end, America’s president is just applying a friendly coat of fresh paint to Donald Trump’s border wall policy.
Joe Biden is intentionally announcing his new immigration plan now, while the Republicans are busy fighting in the trenches in Congress. Their uproar over the president opening a path to immigration for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans thus sounds more muted than usual.
Instead, human rights activists and some Democrats are up in arms, because the new acceptance rules are just friendly packaging for a strict program that further hollows out the right to asylum. The United States apparently does not even want to process the asylum petitions of those who fail to first apply for protection with the U.S. government through an app or in a transit country like Mexico. Mexico has agreed to accept 30,000 third-country nationals deported by the U.S. per month.
Huge Surge at the Border
Donald Trump may owe the Americans a 2,000 mile-long wall, but he still had a deterrent effect on migrants. The pandemic gave him an excuse to turn back asylum seekers at the border without examining their cases.
But today, the surge is huge. Even though Biden denies it, he is following in Trump’s footsteps because even in America, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers abuse the right to asylum, and he is at his wit’s end.
That is all a pretty façade. The U.S. needs comprehensive immigration reform. But that requires a Congress that is willing and able to operate.
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