One of Biden’s first decisions as president will be to draft a bill to legalise the 11 million migrants living in America without official status
This will be the largest amnesty for illegal migrants in US history. The previous record was set by Reagan in 1986, when three million migrants were legalized. Incidentally, one of the consequences of that reform was turning California into a democratic state.
So, too, with the new amnesty, whose main purpose is to give migrants a way to quickly acquire citizenship and start voting right away. The Democratic Party will get millions of new voters and win elections with more than just mass mailings.
On the very eve of Biden’s inauguration, another “migrant caravan” gathered in Honduras – like the ones that stormed the US border fences in autumn 2018.
And unnoticed, a new crisis is brewing on America’s southern frontiers: immediately after the election, the number of illegal border crossings jumped by 51%. Migrants from Latin America have flocked to the US in droves, hoping to be among the legalised ones immediately.
The forthcoming reform is also unique in that it will not offer any solutions to strengthen border security. On the contrary, it is as if the new administration is saying – we now have an open borders policy, we no longer need to fear Trump’s wall, and we will amnesty everyone.
Understandably, it will be quite difficult to get it through Congress, given the shaky majority of Democrats in both houses. As a last resort, however, Biden could grant amnesty to migrants with a single executive order – roughly what Obama did in 2014 with the so-called “dreamers”.
This migration reform is on a par with the imminent passage of “anti-extremist laws” and tougher corporate censorship. The Democrats are going for broke, hoping to consolidate their position as much as possible ahead of Biden’s difficult four-year term.
Malek Dudakov