Joe Biden wants to regularize hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the right protests

Photo: Alex Brandon Associated Press Joe Biden, during a campaign event last Saturday in Los Angeles

Aurélia End – Agence France-Presse in Washington

Published at 10:30 a.m. Updated at 2:24 p.m.

• United States

A few months before the presidential election, Joe Biden announced on Tuesday regularization measures which could benefit hundreds of thousands of people, immediately condemned by his rival Donald Trump and his supporters.

The Democratic president will make it easier to obtain residence permits for spouses of American citizens who live in the United States without having valid papers, and accelerate visa procedures for young graduates, said the White House.

Immigration is a major issue in the campaign for the presidential and legislative elections in November.

It is also a politically delicate theme for the Democratic president, regularly accused of laxity on the matter by the one he will face during the November election, his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, with very strong anti-immigration rhetoric. virulent.

Joe Biden recently announced a very clear tightening of his migration policy, to deal with arrivals at the border with Mexico.

But the 81-year-old Democrat boasts in the at the same time the benefits of regulated and “humane” immigration, through measures such as those announced on Tuesday.

The American government will facilitate the issuance of residence permits permanent — the famous “green card” — to immigrant spouses of American citizens and their children.

People residing for at least ten years in the United States, and married to an American citizen, will be able to initiate a regularization process without having to first leave American territory, as was until now the case.

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“This decision will bring relief to thousands of families,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of a migrant support association, Global Refuge, said in a statement.

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“Electoralist” maneuver

According to the Biden administration's calculations, those who will be eligible have resided in the United States for an average of 23 years .

“This measure will protect approximately half a million spouses of American citizens, and approximately 50,000 immigrant children under the age of 21,” according to the White House.

The announcement immediately aroused strong criticism from the Republican Party.

The radical right elected official Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced an “electoralist” maneuver, while the Republican Josh Brecheen, who represents the state of Oklahoma, estimated that “with the stroke of a pen, President Biden was protecting 550,000 illegals from deportation” in hopes of “harvesting votes.”< /p>

Joe Biden also wants to speed up the work visa procedure for certain immigrants who have obtained a higher education diploma in the United States and have received a job offer in the country.

This decision will apply in particular to beneficiaries of a program protecting immigrant minors, established in 2012 when Barack Obama was president and whose twelfth anniversary Joe Biden will celebrate on Tuesday at the White House.

The Democrat's campaign team also used this anniversary to broadcast a video in which beneficiaries of this program, known in the United States as “Dreamers”, attack Donald Trump's anti-immigration positions in English and Spanish.

The former president wants to organize, in the event of his return to the White House, mass expulsions of 'illegal immigrants.

He accused migrants of “poisoning the blood” of the country and causing crime to soar, without supporting these assertions with evidence. figures but based on certain criminal cases.

The 78-year-old billionaire, for example, mentioned on Monday on his Truth Social platform the arrest of a national of El Salvador, accused of having raped and killed a woman on a hiking trail in Maryland (east), in 2023.

“Now Rachel Morin's five children will grow up without their mother because Joe the crook refuses to close the border. In fact, this week Biden is set to announce a mass amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens! »wrote Donald Trump, criticizing in advance the decisions made public Tuesday by the White House.