Immigration: Joe Biden confronted with his first crisis
The US president has to deal with an influx of migrants on the border with Mexico. So much so that the administration that usually manages natural disasters has been deployed. The Republicans denounce his laxity, the Democrats want to take advantage of it to pass their reforms.
Outside of Covid, this is undoubtedly the first sensitive issue that Joe Biden will have to manage. The number of migrants trying to cross the US border with Mexico has risen sharply in recent weeks, to the point that new Home Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed this week that he could reach his highest level since twenty years. “We are evicting most single adults and families. We do not deport unaccompanied minors. ", did he declare.
The administration has obtained the cooperation of Mexico, which will try to regulate the flow of migrants. In exchange, Washington will send its neighbors surplus AstraZeneca vaccines against the Covid. Faced with the new influx, detention centers for unaccompanied children, which had caused a scandal under Donald Trump, even had to reopen. In February, 100,000 illegal immigrants were arrested at the border. We could count more than 130,000 in March, while this figure had fallen below 75,000 at the end of Donald Trump's mandate.
A humanitarian crisis
Of these 100,000 illegal immigrants, nearly 10,000 were unaccompanied minors. Every day, new arrivals join children who have already been sheltered in makeshift shelters for months. Last weekend, Joe Biden deployed Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officers, who usually handle natural disasters, to the border for three months.
Republicans jumped at the chance to denounce Joe Biden's "lax" program. "When people think they can get in easily, they send their children alone on a train through Mexico, where they could be kidnapped and trafficked, in the hope that they will be taken across the border," said on Fox News Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy.
For Democrats, what is happening is linked to the legacy of Donald Trump, who they say is responsible for the separation of thousands of families. It takes time to find the relatives of these children stranded at the border and the new ones arrive faster than the situations are resolved. This state of affairs therefore calls for urgent action: they should present to Congress, in the coming hours, their migration reform project.
Battle in Congress
The House of Representatives should first decide on the desire to perpetuate the “Dreamers” program, which guarantees the status of children who have arrived illegally on the territory, on the renewal of the statutes protected for humanitarian reasons and on the visas granted to agricultural workers. .
The second part of Joe Biden's plan promises to be much more delicate: it is to legalize and offer access to citizenship, under conditions, to most of the 11 million illegal workers present in the United States, but also to allocate funds to the security of the border and to carry out real policies of cooperation in Central America. A project that should have all the trouble in the world to cross the obstacle of the Senate.
The stakes are high: the Republicans are convinced, as the Senator of Arkansas, Tom Cotton, confided that the subject can cause the Democrats to lose their majority in the House and the Senate, in 2022. To give credibility to their opposition, some Republican parliamentarians have moreover made counter-proposals. “As Hispanics, we don't want false promises, false hopes. We want the 11 million undocumented migrants to be treated with dignity. But that will not happen if we do not stop the madness which acts at the border with real durable solutions ”, denounced the Republican deputy of Florida Maria Salazar. This counter-project would recognize the status of “dreamers”, would make the renewal of residence permits conditional on a clean criminal record and would hunt down businesses that employ illegal immigrants.
