The new presidency has encountered an increase in legal crossings that has overwhelmed shelters and detention centers
The Biden Administration has inspired many parallels with Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s. Its main challenges, the pandemic, and the economic crisis are reminiscent of the Great Depression in magnitude and so do the very expensive measures that Biden is trying to implement. But his true chimera seems to be quite another: immigration. The new presidency has run into an increase in legal crossings that has overflowed shelters and detention centers, and not even the Democrats agree to pass immigration reform.
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In January alone, border police detained 5,871 undocumented minors – the largest increase since the start of the pandemic a year ago. Although it is a lower amount than, for example, 2019, the covid has forced to reduce the capacity of the host facilities by half and has created a logistical problem. According to Axios, the White House says it needs at least 20,000 beds to accomodate children.
To ease pressure from the immigration police, charged with investigating the arrival of undocumented people on a case-by-case basis, Biden has rescinded a measure approved by Donald Trump that made it difficult to grant asylum to children crossing the border. Still, it is only a partial measure, and the Migra continues to detain and deport families back to their countries. A reality that does not look in the left-wing of the Democratic Party.
“This is not right, it never has been, it never will be. Whatever the administration or the party,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Socialist representative. The congresswoman was referring to the opening of a detention center to hold illegally arrived children. In another tweet, Cortez demanded a complete transformation of the immigration system: “The Department of Homeland Security should not exist, agencies have to be reorganized, ICE [the immigration police] have to be eliminated, detention centers should be banned with spirit for profit, creating climate refugee status and more ”.
The opposition has noted that the Democrats, now they are in power, no longer talk about “children in cages,” as they did during the Trump Administration. “These are not children in cages,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded to questions from the Fox News correspondent. “This is a facility that has been opened and that will respect the same standards as other facilities.”
The immigration situation continues in the air, in a kind of limbo, caught between the rigors of the Trump Administration and the reformist will of Biden’s. A complex system and fundamentally incapable of dealing with the massive flow of people who migrating from Central America. In reality, there is no way to accurately measure this flow, so the data on arrests at the border is used for guidance. In 2019 the number of arrests, more than 850,000, was the highest since 2007. Of this number, less than a quarter came from Mexico. Irrigular immigration has turned 20 as one of the main nightmares of Republican and Democratic presidents.
Biden’s immigration plan, pending parliamentary approval, has many vectors. The main one, offering the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the US a “path to citizenship.” If they were already here on January 1, 2021, they will be eligible to have their criminal and tax records checked. If they pass the filter they will be able to spend five years working legally. Then, opt for citizenship. The so-called ‘dreamers’, who entered the US illegally when they were minors, would be included in this large group. Until then the new government has restored the legal guarantee that they will not be deported.
Unlike other immigration laws passed in recent decades, according to ‘The New York Times’, this one will not include a strong investment in border security. This plan is to invest in improving the process of processing immigration paperwork and allocate $ 4,000 million, in a period of four years, to develop the economies of the Central American nations. An attempt to minimize the causes that invite its citizens to put land in the middle to the north.
Perhaps more complicated than the myriad of logistical problems will be convincing the public and their Republican spokesmen. The migration issue has always been very toxic. Donald Trump used it as his main battering ram in 2016, and is one of those traditional cultural battlefields, full of generalizations, buffaloes and existential dilemmas about the demographic future of a changing nation.
A Populace poll indicates that immigration is America’s most polarizing issue. While Americans agree on some priorities, such as protecting the environment and improving access to healthcare, on immigration issues, Democrats and Republicans are at opposite extremes.
However, it is possible that the pandemic and other equations that the country has to solve have left the migration issue in the background. A Gallup poll shows that the first problem that worries Americans is the economy, followed by the pandemic, political dysfunction, racism, unity, and the traditional family. Only 3% of the people prioritize immigration.
But before they can build a majority of support (they will need at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate), the Democrats have to agree with each other. His leadership in the House of Representatives had promised to pass Joe Biden’s immigration reform in March, but the task is getting tough for them. The Democrats, according to ‘Politico‘, do not have enough votes despite having the majority, and they estimate that the law will not be approved before April. Meanwhile, they negotiate the details behind closed doors, trying to harmonize the different sensibilities of the party, and they will pass them through the filter of the House Judiciary Committee.
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“We need to have a debate. [The law] was created by few people. I don’t know what the administration’s role has been,” said Tom O’Halleran, a Democratic representative from Arizona, one of the four states that border Mexico. “But I have the feeling that he is not quite ready.”
O’Halleran and other congressmen from the states bordering Mexico are in electoral situations different from those of Ocasio-Cortez, for example, a representative of a New York district. In Arizona, where 13% of the population was born out of state, last year, two out of three residents are in favor of reducing immigration. Partly because of the worry of not finding a job.
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, of New Jersey, is committed to agreeing to the law and putting it on the table. “We will never win an argument that we do not have the courage to raise,” he told the ‘Times’. “We will do the right thing and make our case for lasting and inclusive immigration reform.”