“Do not come to the border” without having previously launched a legal procedure: Joe Biden tried Thursday to send a message combining firmness and humanity in the face of the record arrivals of migrants at the border with Mexico, a politically perilous subject for the president American.
His announcements have been criticized as much by the right, which regularly accuses him of laxity on the subject, as by human rights associations, who accuse him of attacking the right of asylum.
The Democrat promised to fix a “broken” immigration system, in a speech at the White House, while acknowledging that this “difficult” problem would not be solved “overnight”.
Joe Biden will travel on Sunday, for the first time after two years in office, to the southern border of the United States, more precisely to El Paso, Texas.
He will then go to Mexico, and has already made it known that the “strengthening of the border” would be at the heart of his discussions with his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, who maintains sometimes very fresh relations with his big neighbor. .
The president blasted “extreme” Republicans, accusing them of “grandstanding” over the migration crisis, and accusing them of blocking his requests for funding to deal with the problem.
“We can secure our border and fix immigration policy so that it is orderly, safe and humane; we can do all of this without extinguishing the flame of freedom that has brought generations of immigrants to America,” he said.
But his administration has nevertheless announced “new consequences” for migrants who cross the border illegally: the United States will more often resort to immediate expulsions, accompanied by a ban on new entry into the territory for five years.
More than 230,000 arrests were still recorded in November at the southern border of the United States, a record level.
The United States will create 30,000 additional residence permits per month for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the countries that currently supply the largest flows of illegal immigrants.
But nationals of these countries may, if they do not take this legal route, be turned back as soon as they attempt to cross the border illegally. Although it is difficult to return them to their respective countries, due to political or security conditions, Mexico has committed to accepting 30,000 per month.
The United States also wants to restrict eligibility for asylum by establishing a rule that individuals who have not made a formal application to the United States, or to another country through which they pass, will be excluded except for exceptions.
800 dead
“President Biden rightly said today that asylum is a legal right, and he spoke with compassion for people fleeing persecution. But the program he has announced puts his administration in line with Trump’s anti-migrant policies, ”denounced the ACLU, a powerful civil rights association.
Conversely, the AFL, an organization marked on the right, criticized the president for promising “a mass amnesty to 30,000 illegal aliens each month”, which it says is a “brazen violation of the law”.
Large swaths of the US economy, particularly in agriculture, depend on immigrant labor.
Migrants, anxious to escape poverty or violence in their countries of origin, often take enormous risks to enter American soil.
More than 800 people died in the fiscal year, many drowned in the Rio Grande River, according to a border guard official quoted by NPR radio.
These flows also exert pressure on border localities, whose infrastructure struggles to accommodate these migrants in decent conditions.
For now, the Biden administration has mostly relied on a measure put in place by his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, during the pandemic, which allows the immediate return of any illegal alien intercepted at the border, including potential applicants. of asylum.
This measure, dubbed “Title 42”, is the subject of an intense judicial guerrilla warfare, the epilogue of which will be known in June at the Supreme Court of the United States.