Biden 2.0: The US could double its undocumented immigrant population
BY NOLAN RAPPAPORT, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/06/23 8:30 AM ET
This op-ed is part of a series exploring what a second term would look like for either President Biden or former President Trump.
President Biden initially sought to reform our “broken” immigration system through legislative means. On his first day in office, he sent his U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 to Congress. It would establish numerous immigration benefits, including the largest legalization program in U.S. history, increased opportunities for lawful immigration and humane treatment of migrants at the border.
When this didn’t work, he shifted his focus to administrative actions. This included bypassing the visa system by bringing migrants here through new legal pathways, catch and release at the border and restricting interior enforcement. Apparently, by “broken,” he means that existing law doesn’t permit enough immigrants to come here and subjects the ones here unlawfully to the threat of deportation.
This has caused serious, presumably unanticipated consequences, such as a record-breaking increase in illegal border crossings and an immigration court backlog crisis that can’t be fixed.
https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4292447-biden-2-0-the-us-could-double-its-undocumented-immigrant-population/
