Biden Rescinds Immigrant Visa Ban, Keeps Worker Ban: Who Benefits? SHARE
President Joe Biden rescinded Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation banning new immigrant visas for most new legal permanent residents coming from abroad. Trump justified the ban based on old, disproven economic protectionist arguments. He claimed immigrants would take jobs. During his campaign and in this proclamation, President Biden rejected this idea. Yet incongruously, he’s keeping an identical ban on temporary work visa holders.
The State Department issued nearly 290,000 fewer immigrant visas in the categories that the ban targeted during the year that it was in effect. If they are not from a country on which Biden has imposed a countrywide entry ban mostly Europe, South Africa, Brazil, China, and Iran these immigrants will now be able to immigrate to the United States. This is great news for them and for the Americans with whom they plan to associate.
President Trump restricted legal immigration through a series of unprecedented regulations and presidential orders during his one term. Once President‐elect Joe Biden takes office, he will have the opportunity to reverse these actions and deregulate what is and was even before Trump an overly burdensome and expensive legal immigration system. This compendium of 30 concise proposals by 15 authors including several of America’s leading immigration law experts can help the Biden administration operate the immigration system as openly and efficiently as the laws allow.
These proposals focus entirely on agency measures to improve the process for legal immigrants. Keeping with Biden’s campaign theme of “building back better,” they look past simply repealing Trump’s misguided executive actions to instead create new, better rules for a fully recovered America. For this reason, these reforms do not address temporary actions needed only to address COVID-19 nor do they specifi