Biden Administration’s Contradictory Approaches to Immigration and Covid-19 Continue
By Robert Law on April 23, 2021
The other day I wrote about the Biden administration’s decision to allow in 22,000 additional H-2B low-skilled, non-agricultural temporary foreign workers for the remainder of the fiscal year. My colleague David North previously noted that, within the additional H-2B visas, there is a 6,000 visa carve-out just for alien workers from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to “expand lawful pathways for opportunity in the United Statesâ€. The point I was making in my previous post was that this decision sends a clear message that the Biden administration prefers foreign workers over getting Americans back to work.
But there is more to this story. Looked at through the lens of the government’s response to Covid-19, it is the latest example of President Biden treating aliens, both legal and illegal, better than law-abiding U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.
Last month, I wrote about the Biden administration’s decision to stop applying Title 42’s emergency health authority, permitting the government to turn away all aliens at the border, to unaccompanied alien children (UACs). Yet at the same time Biden was allowing UACs into the country, the United States, Canada, and Mexico issued a joint statement that these shared borders remain closed to “non-essential travelâ€. This blanket exemption of UACs from Title 42 created an optic of these illegal aliens being considered “essential travel†by the Biden administration.
https://cis.org/Law/Biden-Administrations-Contradictory-Approaches-Immigration-and-Covid19-Continue
