Biden Has Now Embraced Republican Restrictionism on Immigration

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/biden-immigration-asylum/

The Biden administration will soon implement a policy that will “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain.” One could be forgiven for thinking that this regulation, slated to go into effect in mid-May, expands access to the asylum process. In fact, it does the opposite. The new policy “encourages” lawful pathways by further criminalizing the most common existing pathways. Once the rule goes into effect, anyone who passes through another country on their way to the United States and crosses the border between official entry points will be deemed ineligible for asylum unless they applied for asylum in that other country first. There are a few exceptions, but the new policy will affect virtually all non-Mexican nationals who arrive at the border.

Migrants can still ask for asylum at ports of entry, but the Biden administration recently made that process harder as well. Since January, all asylum seekers are required to schedule appointments with Customs and Border Protection via the CBP One app rather than going to the port of entry and asking for protection. CBP One limits access to asylum to people who have smartphones; can read English, Spanish, or Haitian Creole, the only languages in which the app is available; and can spend days or weeks checking the app for available appointments and weeks or months on top of that waiting for an interview date. Migrants who manage to clear these hurdles have to contend with a glitchy app that crashes often and that, advocates say, fails to recognize darker skin tones (migrants have to submit “video selfies” with their applications).

Put in the simplest terms possible, Biden made it harder for migrants to ask for asylum at official border crossings and is now trying to punish them for crossing between ports of entry. In doing so, the administration is enshrining several Trump-era border policies—even though, three years ago, Biden promised to undo the damage that Trump had done to the immigration system. It’s Republican restrictionism dressed up in the technocratic, social-justice-inflected language that has become endemic among Democrats of a certain type.

“To be clear, this was not our first preference, or even our second,” an administration official told reporters in late February. The official added that Congress’s inability to pass an immigration-reform bill forced the president’s hand. But Congress hasn’t passed any immigration laws in decades, and that didn’t stop Trump from his first- and second-choice immigration policies: building a wall, banning travel from Muslim-majority countries, and limiting asylum at the border.

[alwaysinasnit]

1. I am disappointed in Biden's use of such disingenuous wording; "encourage migrants to avail

themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States..." Legal pathways are severely limited. For the vast majority of these people who are poor, the only legal pathway is through a close family relative here in the US that has legal status to petition for immigration benefits for them. And even then, depending on the immigration category of that petition and the country of origin, it could take a few years at best, and decades at worst, to get that petition processed.

[BlackSkimmer]

2. Yes. nt

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Evening kick.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Next-day kick.