(Washington) A few months before the presidential election, Joe Biden announced on Tuesday regularization measures which could benefit hundreds of thousands of people, and which were immediately condemned by supporters of his rival Donald Trump.
The Democratic president will make it easier for spouses of American citizens living in the United States without proper papers to obtain residence permits, and speed up visa procedures for recent graduates, the White House announced.
Immigration is a major campaign issue for the November elections in the United States.
It is also a politically delicate theme for the Democratic president, regularly accused of laxity on the matter by the man he will face during the November election, his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, with very virulent anti-immigration rhetoric.
Joe Biden recently announced a very clear tightening of his migration policy, to deal with arrivals at the border with Mexico.
But the 81-year-old Democrat, keen to distinguish himself from his predecessor, at the same time praises the benefits of regulated and “humane” immigration, through measures such as those announced on Tuesday.
The U.S. government will make it easier to issue permanent residency permits – the so-called “green cards” – and work permits to immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens and their children.
People who have resided in the United States for at least ten years, and married to an American citizen, will in the future be able to initiate a regularization process without having to first leave American territory, as was until now the case. case.
According to the Biden administration’s calculations, those who will be eligible have resided in the United States for an average of 23 years.
“This measure will protect approximately half a million spouses of American citizens, and approximately 50,000 immigrant children under the age of 21,” according to the White House.
The announcement immediately sparked strong criticism from the Republican Party.
Radical right elected official Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced an “electoralist” maneuver, while Republican Josh Brecheen, who represents the state of Oklahoma, estimated that “with the stroke of a pen, President Biden was protecting 550,000 Illegals from Deportation” in hopes of “harvesting the votes” of affected family members in November.
Joe Biden also wants to speed up the work visa procedure for certain immigrants who have obtained a higher education diploma in the United States and have received a job offer in the country.
This decision will apply in particular to beneficiaries of a program protecting immigrant minors, put in place in 2012 when Barack Obama was president and whose twelfth anniversary Joe Biden will celebrate on Tuesday at the White House.
The Democrat’s campaign team also used this anniversary to broadcast a video in which beneficiaries of this program, known in the United States as “Dreamers”, attack the positions in English and Spanish. Donald Trump’s anti-immigration.
The former president wants to organize, in the event of his return to the White House, mass expulsions of illegal immigrants.
He accused migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country and causing crime to soar there, without supporting these claims with figures.