JOE Biden is going to ask Congress to offer legal status to 11 million people in the country – just a day after one of his aides said the 8,000 migrants traveling in a caravan to the United States “won’t be let in right now.”
The president-elect said he was going to immediately ask Congress to offer a pathway to citizenship to the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.
He made headlines last week when announcing the plan given how divided immigration issues are within each party, let alone between Democrats and Republicans.
Sources close to Biden said he vowed to announce the legislation on his first day in office.
Although he campaigned on a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million people living in the United States undocumented, he did go into detail how quickly he would move to do so while working on the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Many have faulted Biden for seemingly repeating an Obama-era promise, in which Barack Obama vowed to similarly introduce an immigration bill in his first year of office but not doing so until his second term.
“This really does represent a historic shift from Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda that recognizes that all of the undocumented immigrants that are currently in the United States should be placed on a path to citizenship,” National Immigration Law Center Executive Director Marielena Hincapie said, who was briefed on the bill.
If passed, the legislation would be the largest move towards granting undocumented people legal status since Reagan did so to three million people in 1986.
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain said Biden will send the immigration bill to Congress “on his first day in office.”
Biden’s remarks come a day after he said the more than 8,000 migrants heading to the United States in a caravan would not be let into the United States at the current moment.
Migrants “need to understand they’re not going to be able to come into the United States immediately,” an unnamed official said.
The official said the Biden administration would be sympathetic to migrants, “but now is not the time to make the journey.”
However, those close to Biden have said Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate might delay consideration of the bill, and said that it might not be passed within his first 100 days in office.
Some policy experts welcomed Biden’s move – but are still holding their breath.
“I was pleasantly surprised that they were going to take quick action because we got the same promises from Obama, who got elected in ’08, and he totally failed,” said Domingo Garcia, former president of the League of Latin American Citizens.
