Washington: Joe Biden has been very clear about restoring compassion and order to America’s immigration system. This information was shared by a senior White House official. He said the recent executive actions by the US President are just the beginning to correct the ‘divisive, inhumane and immoral policies’ of the past four years. He said Joe Biden will try and correct the mistakes made by the previous administration.
A White House spokesman said this Thursday. His comments came after the Biden administration was urged not to issue the most sought-after H-1B work visa to any new individual born in India. This is till the the country-cap on green cards or permanent legal residency is removed.
“The executive actions signed thus far are just the beginning,” a White House spokesperson told this agency. “President Biden has been very clear about restoring compassion and order to our immigration system. He wants to correct the divisive, inhumane and immoral policies of the past four years. It will be our focus in the coming weeks and months,” the spokesperson said.
Biden this month signed three executive orders that he said would lead to a ‘fair, orderly and humane’ legal immigration system. The orders would also undo his predecessor Donald Trump’s hardline policies that ripped children from the arms of their families.
Reversing the Trump administration’s ‘cruel’ immigration policies was Biden’s one of the key election promises.
Restricting immigration has been a focus of the Trump administration since its first days. First it issued the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. The ban continued into Trump’s final year in office as the White House uses the coronavirus pandemic as cover.
The current per-country cap on issuing of green cards in the US has resulted in Indian professionals, mostly from the IT sector, having to wait for decades for their legal permanent residency.
“Issuing new H-1B visas to more Indians would add to this agonising painful wait for green cards,” the Immigration Voice said in a statement, in response to the Biden administration’s decision to allow employers of H-1B visa holders to begin registering online for the H1-B Visa lottery, starting March 9 this year, for the fiscal year 2022.
Under the system, over 60,000 additional Indian nationals will unwittingly be lured to enter the United States this year (and every year) to ‘engage in a life of indentured servitude’ where their very existence and the ‘lives of their families will be completely subject to the whims of their employer, new administrations, or even individual immigration adjudicators having a bad day’, said Aman Kapoor, president of Immigration Voice.
Kapoor called on the Biden administration to use its authority under INA Section 212(f) to exclude any new individual born in India who are not currently in the United States legally from obtaining a new H-1B visa for the first time in Fiscal Year 2022. The White House, however, did not say if the administration intends to issue such an order.