A few months before the presidential election, Joe Biden announced on Tuesday regularization measures which could benefit hundreds of thousands of people, announcements immediately condemned by his Republican rival Donald Trump.
“We can both secure the border (with Mexico) and provide legal avenues for immigration,” said the American president, candidate for a second term, in a speech at the White House.
The 81-year-old Democrat took the opportunity to criticize his predecessor, accusing him of fueling the “fears” of Americans and considering it “scandalous” to say, as the 78-year-old Republican billionaire did, that migrants were “animals” that “poison the blood” of the country.
Donald Trump, campaigning in Wisconsin (north), assured him that if he was elected in November, this “illegal amnesty project (would) be torn up and thrown away from day one”, while his supporters claimed, the intention of irregular migrants, “Let’s fire them! Let’s fire them!”.
The Republican’s campaign team, which promises mass expulsions in the event of an electoral victory, assured that the measures announced Tuesday would “without a doubt fuel migrant crime” or even “steal the social benefits of American seniors”.
Joe Biden is trying to both respond to accusations of laxity from the right and remain faithful to his campaign promises of a more “humane” immigration system.
The president, who recently announced very restrictive measures against asylum seekers arriving at the southern border of the United States, will facilitate the issuance of permanent residence permits – the famous “green card” – to spouses of American citizens and their children.
People who have resided in the United States for at least ten years, and married to an American citizen, will be able to initiate a regularization process without having to first leave American territory, as was until now the case.
– “Common sense” –
“This measure will protect approximately half a million spouses of American citizens, and approximately 50,000 immigrant children under the age of 21,” according to the White House.
The large civil rights association ACLU “welcomed” Joe Biden’s decision in a statement, seeing in it “the kind of humane and common sense measures that make America stronger.”
The same NGO had, on the contrary, decided to file a complaint against the measures taken by the Democratic president to limit entries at the border with Mexico.
Joe Biden also wants to speed up the work visa procedure for certain immigrants who have obtained a higher education diploma in the United States and have received a job offer in the country.
This decision will apply in particular to beneficiaries of a program protecting immigrant minors, implemented in 2012 when Barack Obama was president.
The Democrat’s campaign team released a video in which beneficiaries of this program, known in the United States as “Dreamers”, attack Donald Trump’s anti-immigration positions in English and Spanish.
The former president regularly refers to particularly shocking murders, committed by people who entered the United States illegally, to emphasize that there is a wave of crime due to illegal immigration.
But neither the police statistics available in major American cities, nor the studies carried out by experts, show the reality of such a phenomenon.
His campaign team mentioned on Tuesday the recent arrest of a national of El Salvador, accused of having raped and killed a woman on a hiking trail in Maryland (east), in 2023, to then assure that Joe Biden would regularize “millions” of people in an irregular situation.
This suspect, however, does not meet any of the criteria to be affected by the measures announced Tuesday by the White House.
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