Biden’s immigration policy: Aliens no more, alienated forever
The Biden policy may prevent assimilation, increase crime, and create demographic imbalance.
With great difficulty, President Donald Trump was dissuaded by his aides from revoking the citizenship of millions of Americans born of illegal immigrant parents on American soil. Before he could move legislation to insert an exception to the Fourteenth Amendment to thwart children of illegal aliens from acquiring citizenship only because they were born in America, President Trump caught the coronavirus. On release from hospital, he got busy with his reelection campaign and shelved his immigration agenda for the time being. In November 2020, to the great relief of millions of such prospective “Americans” and 11 million more undocumented immigrants, most of whom were from Latin America, Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.
Joseph R. Biden. Jr. of Delaware, who replaced Donald Trump as America’s 46th President, started undoing the immigration policies of his predecessor in fulfillment of a campaign promise. His liberal immigration agenda, product of more than 50 years of the Democratic Party’s thinking on both immigration and immigrants, aimed at removing all obstacles to the acquisition of American citizenship by both illegal aliens and refugees till then kept out by successive Administrations. In fact, such illegal immigrants were not “aliens” anymore. They were to be referred to as “noncitizens”: a humane treatment of non-americans who had entered America illegally but regarded American citizenship as a matter of right.
Accordingly, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security, to which it reports, have been instructed by the Biden Administration to refer to illegal aliens as “undocumented noncitizens”. As a matching instruction, Americans have been asked not to expect immigrants to “assimilate”, but to “integrate” them into American society. There are two things here. Even if immigrants
don’t assimilate, mainstream Americans were not going to insist on their assimilation but accept them as they were and treat them with respect. More importantly, the fact that the federal government intended to treat illegal immigrants with respect meant that the Administration had long-term plans regarding their future, the grant of American citizenship being the minimum respect that
the US government could afford them.
President Biden’s reinstatement of DACA (Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals), instituted by President Barack Obama in 2012 through executive order, was cancelled by a federal court in July last year. The expansion and further extension of DACA, which protects illegal aliens, brought to America as children, from deportation by
allowing them to apply for work permits, was rescinded by President Trump. Presently, despite the federal court’s ruling banning new applications to DACA, already-enrolled recipients are allowed to retain both their status and their benefits. Though Biden’s campaign promise in this regard remains to be fulfilled, he can always tell supporters that he tried.
Biden again came across as
America’s biggest guarantor against deportation of illegal immigrants as he limited the dreaded United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’S deportation practices to only those guilty of violent crimes and perceived as threats to national security; illegal aliens charged with nonviolent and /or petty crimes were to be left untouched (by extension, that would leave out burglars and sexual offenders as well). Clipping the wings of ICE would definitely make illegal immigration a major source of crime in America.
The day he became President, Joe Biden revoked Executive Order 13780, popularly known as the Trump travel ban and perceived by immigration advocates as highly discriminatory toward citizens of certain countries as if it was their natural right to enter America. The urgency with which the travel ban was lifted testifies to its enormity to the ultra-liberal wing of the Democratic Party whom Biden wants to appease, if not empower.
A similar urgency was witnessed with regard to the construction of the Mexican border wall. In another order passed on the day he took office, Biden instructed that all work on the wall be stopped forthwith. Biden had always agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the construction was unnecessary and a huge wastage of federal funds. Curiously, the border wall became a battleground of partisan interests as Republican
Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas, resumed construction of the wall along 13 miles of the border of his state with Mexico in October last year, in total disregard of the Biden revocation.
By insisting that immigrants need not assimilate into American society but be accepted as they were by Americans, Biden is calling for culture wars on American soil. By stopping the deportation of illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds, crime is set to rise in America. Lifting the Trump travel ban may make America vulnerable to terrorist acts. All these, apart from the great demographic and cultural imbalance that unbridled grant of citizenship to millions of “undocumented noncitizens” may entail. If Lyndon Baines Johnson was credited with opening the doors of America to the world, Joe Biden can pride himself on dismantling the door altogether.