Biden’s measures on spouses of US citizens are good for everyone

In a long-awaited announcement on Tuesday, President Biden said revealed an executive action This would grant a so-called “parole in place” permit to spouses of U.S. citizens who have lived in the country for 10 or more years, as well as their children under the age of 21 without residency papers. This, in turn, would pave the way for applications for permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship.

This order addresses a simple question: Should people who have lived in the United States for a long time, who have built lives here with American spouses and, very often, children, and who are pursuing their own version of the American dream, be given access to the procedures to which they are already entitled by law?

Because let’s not forget: local parole does not create a new path to citizenship, as is often falsely portrayed. It allows undocumented people to use the existing system for families of U.S. citizens, which has been part of the country’s immigration framework for more than seventy years.

The reason people haven’t been able to do that is because we’ve created an inconsistent system that creates opportunities and penalizes people who take advantage of them. Under current law, residency is possible for people married to citizens and their children, but the application must be made either from outside the country entirely or after the person has returned to the country legally.

This seems simple enough, except that leaving the United States after a year or more of illegal residence results in a ten-year ban on re-entry. The process for granting exemptions is cumbersome, slow, and simply unnecessary.

There will be those who call this executive overreach, just as they do the DACA program, which remains popular with most Americans of both parties despite years of attacks and exaggerations from political opponents.

We can imagine that many of those who denounce the tyranny of the White House from a political perspective were quite pleased with Biden’s recent executive action on immigration, which aims to effectively close the border to humanitarian immigration – a drastic step that would have been a Stephen Miller pipe dream just a few years ago.

Was not convinced by this effortwho has long favored a federal program that actually helps asylum seekers resettle and house them, providing them with language and housing assistance and faster work permits, but it should certainly neutralize the impression that the president is pursuing an open-border agenda. What Biden is showing here is both compassion and common sense, a mix that some of his political opponents unfortunately lack all too much.

Like many policies in favour of immigration, this will bring both economic and social benefits. These are people who, in many cases, are eager to learn, start businesses and generally grow the economic pie for all, and who have been hampered by outdated and nonsensical policies. It will benefit us all to give them a chance to enter not only intellectually but also formally into the political system of their now adopted country.

Ultimately, there is hardly a greater patriot than the one who must strive to make this country his own.