Joe Biden’s Immigration Policies

Immigration policies under Joe Biden’s new administration are expected to be very different from those under the Trump administration. Joe Biden believes the U.S. is ‘a nation of immigrants’, an expression that was infamously removed from the USCIS’s mission statement in 2018. What are his plans?

IN THE FIRST 100 DAYS, a Biden Administration will:

1. Asylum: Reverse the Trump Administration’s policies that separate parents from their children at our border; end the mismanagement of the asylum system; end prolonged detention and reinvest in a case management program.
2. Public Charge: Reverse Trump’s public charge rule.
3. Enforcement Priorities: Direct enforcement efforts toward threats to public safety and national security by targeting people who have been convicted of serious criminal offenses.
4. End workplace raids to ensure that threats based on workers’ status do not interfere with their ability to organize and improve their wages and working conditions.
5. Streamline and improve the naturalization process to make it more accessible to qualified green card holders.

NEXT, a Biden Administration will:

1. Modernize America’s Immigration System by passing a comprehensive immigration reform.
2. Create a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly 11 million people who have been living in and strengthening our country for years, but without immigration status, including Dreamers.
3. Reform the visa program for temporary workers in select industries that depend on seasonal workers who only seek to be in the U.S. for a short time.
4. First, reform the temporary visa system and ensure work visas do not disincentivize recruiting workers already in the U.S. i.e., protect the job market and wage level.
5. Afterwards, support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country (country quota).
6. Provide a path to legalization for agricultural workers who have worked for years on U.S. farms and continue to work in agriculture.
7. Support family-based immigration by preserving family unification as a foundation of our immigration system by allowing any approved applicant to receive a temporary non-immigrant visa until the permanent visa is processed.
8. Treat the spouse and children of green card holders as the immediate relatives they are, exempting them from caps.
9. Preserve the Diversity Visa lottery.
10. Build in flexibility to increase or decrease the number of visas offered for permanent, work-based immigration based on macroeconomic conditions. (The current cap is set at 140,000 each year.)
11. Exempt recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields in the U.S. from any cap.
12. Create a new visa category to allow cities and counties to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth.
13. Increase visas for domestic violence survivors.
14. Increase the number of refugees we welcome into the country. There are more than 70 million displaced people in the world today. He will set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000.

The Trump administration has taken more than 400 executive actions. As a result, the flow of legal immigrants has been analyzed to be reduced by about 50%. The Biden can undo executive orders through executive orders. However, some of the bigger plans including immigration reforms will take time and also need support from the Congress.

The information contained in article is provided for general information only and should not serve as a substitute for legal advice.

Jenny ParkNovember 10, 2020Comment