SAN DIEGO – President Joe Biden on Wednesday lifted a suspension on the issuance of permanent residence cards that was implemented by his predecessor during the pandemic, and that lawyers say was blocking most legal immigration to the United States.
Former President Donald Trump suspended last spring the issuance of the so-called “green cards” until the end of 2020 in order to protect the labor market hard affected by the coronavirus, an argument that Trump used to achieve many of the cuts to legal immigration that had failed to implement prior to the pandemic.
On December 31, Trump extended those orders until the end of March.
The former Republican president had indicated that immigrants represented “a risk to the American labor market” and prevented their entry into the United States by issuing Proclaims 10014 and 10052.
In his proclamation on Wednesday, Biden stipulated that closing the door on legal immigrants “does not advance the interests of the United States.”
“On the contrary, it harms the United States, including preventing some relatives of US citizens and legal permanent residents from reuniting with their families here. It also affects the industries of the United States that use the talent of people from all over the world ”, said the president.
Most of the immigrant visas had been suspended due to the orders, according to immigration attorneys.
Up to 120,000 family-based preference visas were lost in large part due to the suspension implemented by the pandemic in fiscal year 2020, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Immigrants could not bring family members unless they were US citizens applying for visas for their spouses and children under the age of 21.
It also prevented the entry of immigrants with work visas, unless they were considered a benefit for national interests, such as health professionals.
In addition, it closed the door to thousands of visa lottery winners, who were chosen at random from a pool of about 14 million applicants to receive green cards that would allow them to live permanently in the United States.
The blocked visas add to a growing backlog of 437,000 applications for family-based visas alone, said California immigration attorney Curtis Morrison, who represented thousands of people affected by the suspension.
“I am delighted for my clients, who are now in a position to enter the United States,” he said. “But that delay (in applications) will take years if the government does not take ambitious measures.”
Last year, a federal judge issued a ruling that effectively nullified Proclamation 10052 by allowing temporary foreign workers to enter the United States if their employers were members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or other large organizations representing the United States. much of the American economy.
But Proclamation 10014 continued to block the entry of thousands of immigrants.
Immigration lawyers said they were surprised Biden did not immediately lift the suspension, as he did with Trump’s travel ban on people from Muslim countries. As a result, some immigrants who were affected by the travel ban found they were still unable to travel to the United States due to the suspension.
A few days ago, thousands of visa lottery winners, risking having their permits expire, got a court order that put their process on hold from the judge in the case. They will now be allowed to use their visas to enter the country.
The United States offers up to 55,000 visas a year for immigrants whose nationalities are underrepresented in the country’s population. Visas must be used within the first six months of being obtained.
Meanwhile, Biden has proposed a bill that would limit the presidential authority to issue future bans against immigrants.
The president has not said if there will be any compensation for winners of the visa lottery who lost their opportunity due to the policies implemented by the pandemic. However, he called on the United States to increase the number of diversity visas available in the lottery each year from 55,000 to 80,000.