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Before starting your visit to Mexico, US President Joe Biden announced that he intends to expand the immigration policy imposed on Venezuelans in October 2022 and apply it to immigrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. Under this new criteria, his government would admit 30,000 migrants each month. At first glance, Biden’s action seems like a generous gesture based on the liberal sentiments of a president who vowed to ensure our values as a nation of immigrants.
Biden’s plan is nothing more than a symbolic gesture that will ultimately end up denying asylum to the majority of immigrants who will never qualify under his bill. In practice, his government continues to implement the policy of former President Donald Trump. His actions demonstrate the continuity that exists between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to immigration. Using Title 42 (sanitary measure dating from 1944) Biden will limit the possibility of immigrants requesting asylum upon arrival at the US-Mexico border. And not only does Title 42 apply to these immigrants, it also imposes another obstacle established by Trump. Immigrants will not be able to claim asylum if they have not first applied for, and been denied, asylum in the countries they passed through to reach the US.
In Biden’s new plan, migrants have to apply for asylum for a apps from their country of origin, have a valid passport, have an air ticket and demonstrate that they have the financial sponsorship of a person in the US, conditions that favor people with financial resources and family members in the US. To ensure that migrants do not enter not wanted
Biden, like every Republican and Democratic president, is proposing to spend more than $3.5 billion to add thousands of new immigration agents and continue to militarize the US-Mexico border. Even though international laws and the US itself offer migrants the right to request asylum, Biden’s message in January 2023 is the same as that of his vice president, Kamala Harris, in June 2021 in Guatemala: Do not come
.
Faced with the possibility that the Biden government would end the use of Title 42, a group of Republican governors filed a lawsuit before the Supreme Court that allowed its continuation. Although publicly Biden declared: I don’t like Title 42
, his administration has not only used it, but now expands it to include new countries. Promoted by Stephen Miller, a racist adviser to Trump, Title 42 was used as a pretext during the pandemic to prohibit an immigrant from applying for asylum. Through Title 42, Department of Homeland Security agents expelled more than 2.5 million refugees even though they had a reasonable fear
given the conditions that existed in their countries of origin.
Although Biden wanted to highlight his liberal position and blame the Republicans for opposing comprehensive immigration reform, in practice he has followed the anti-immigrant policy of Obama (the president who has deported the most people) and Trump. Her advisers prefer to avoid a confrontation with both Democratic and Republican conservatives. Even more important is the fact that Biden’s proposal expresses a new vision on immigration and refuge in the context of a new post-neoliberal world order.
The Democrats prefer to blame the Republicans in order to avoid their responsibility for the migration crisis, a product of neoliberalism, the so-called war on drugs and the wars, not only on their borders, but throughout the world. Until the end of 2022, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency; however, an immigration reform did not advance. The same happened in the first Obama administration.
Biden’s new policy highlights the hypocrisy in the creation and treatment of so-called wanted and unwanted immigrants. What Trump at the time called immigrants from fucking countries
. Under this criterion, Europeans are welcome, particularly Ukrainians, but the door is closed to Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and also Africans. Biden’s new plan will exacerbate the humanitarian crisis at the border.
The disaster at the borders between the so-called northern and southern countries reflects more than a conflict between human values and political needs. The world system requires a large part of humanity to live in precarious conditions and at the same time requires the free movement of goods, unrestricted investment and rapid flow of finance. Freedom, the great concern of neoliberals, is not within the reach of the vast majority of humanity who will continue to face obstacles and walls when trying to escape precarious conditions in their countries of origin.
Liberals in the US (and of course other countries) have abandoned their 20th century social democratic vision of a world of equality, mobility and general development. Today, they argue that we have to accept a world divided between those who will cross borders with passports and visas, carrying credit cards, and other privileges and those who will walk through jungles like the Darien or cross stormy seas like the Mediterranean while carrying their children. and his dreams on his shoulders.
The world has been divided into two groups: those who can anticipate a cultural experience in any destination and those who face barbed wire and walls. Standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the American Sephardic poet Emma Lazarus described the immigration policy ideals of an earlier era in the United States: Send me your tired, your poor, your masses wishing for freedom
. Today the famous verse should be updated: Send me your wealthy classes, your educated sectors and your oligarchs willing to invest.
*Pomona College faculty
