SAN DIEGO – President Joe Biden on Wednesday lifted the freeze on green cards issued by his predecessor during the pandemic that lawyers said was blocking most of the legal immigration to the United States.
Former President Donald Trump last spring suspended the issuance of green cards until the end of 2020 in the name of protecting the job market destroyed by the coronavirus – a reason Trump gave to achieve many of the legal immigration cuts that had escaped him before of the pandemic.
Trump on December 31 extended these orders to the end of March.
Trump considered immigrants a “risk to the U.S. labor market” and blocked his entry into the United States by publishing Proclamation 10014 and Proclamation 10052.
Biden stated in his proclamation on Wednesday that closing the door on legal immigrants “does not promote the interests of the United States”.
“On the contrary, it harms the United States, including by preventing some family members of United States citizens and legal permanent residents from joining their families here. It also hurts industries in the United States that use talent from around the world, “said Biden in his proclamation.
Most immigrant visas have been blocked by orders, according to immigration lawyers.
About 120,000 family preferred visas were lost largely due to the pandemic-related freeze in the budget year 2020, according to the American Immigrant Lawyers Association. Immigrants were not allowed to bring family members unless they were US citizens applying for visas for their spouses or children under the age of 21.
It also prevented the entry of immigrants with work visas, unless they were considered beneficial to the national interest, such as health professionals.
And it slammed the door on thousands of visa lottery winners who were chosen at random from a group of about 14 million applicants to receive green cards that would allow them to live permanently in the United States.
Blocked visas increase the backlog of applications to 437,000 for family visas alone, said California immigration lawyer Curtis Morrison, who represented thousands of people blocked by the freeze.
“I am thrilled for my clients, who are now in a position that they can now enter the United States,” he said. “But that buildup will take years if the government doesn’t take ambitious action.”
A federal judge last year issued a decision that virtually suspended Proclamation 10052, allowing temporary foreign workers to enter the United States if their employers were members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or several other large organizations that represent much of the U.S. economy. .
But Proclamation 10014 continued to block thousands of immigrants.
Immigration lawyers said they were surprised that Biden did not immediately suspend the freeze as he did with Trump’s travel ban imposed on people from Muslim-majority countries. As a result, some immigrants blocked by the travel ban found that they were still unable to go to the United States because of the freeze.
Biden’s actions come just days after thousands of visa lottery winners at risk of their visas expiring won a court order that suspended visas by the judge in the case. Now they can use their visas to enter the country.
The United States provides up to 55,000 visas a year to immigrants whose nationalities are underrepresented in the US population. Visas must be used within six months of being obtained.
Meanwhile, Biden has proposed legislation that would limit the presidential authority to issue future bans against immigrants.
The president did not say whether there would be any redress for the visa lottery winners who lost because of the policies of the pandemic era. But he is asking the United States to increase the number of diversity visas available through the lottery each year from 55,000 to 80,000.