Former President Trump’s harsh and cruel immigration policies were the subject of much controversy and opposition during his time in office. President Biden, during his campaign, made a key commitment in his platform that he would undo the policies of his predecessor. On his first day in office, Biden signed several executive orders repealing Trump’s executive orders — including orders concerning the Muslim ban, construction of the border wall, and an interior enforcement mandate. To his credit, Biden has continued to remove much of the immigration restrictions that Trump implemented and has implemented responsive initiatives for Ukrainian, Venezuelan, and Haitian refugees. All of this is genuinely worthy of praise, but returning to the pre-Trump status quo with some improvements isn’t the limit of what we should strive for. While Biden’s attempt to moderate on immigration in response to the influx of asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border is evidently motivated by polling concerns, there are major steps he can take to improve the immigration system in ways that I highly doubt would lead to backlash. There is no excuse for settling on immigration when these policies could be enacted.
There are a number of simple administrative improvements that would reduce the mess of bureaucracy that is the US immigration system. First, non-immigrant visa holders are forced to renew their visas outside of the United States, which makes the process needlessly long and difficult. Changing this would hardly be unprecedented — prior to 2004, domestic visa renewal for non-immigrants was available. While this is something the State Department has said they have been “working on” , active focus by Biden would help.
Another potential policy could be to stop letting unused and unclaimed green cards go to waste — instead recapturing the slots and giving them out, rather than letting them count against limits. The Niskanen Center estimates that executive action alone could recapture 231,584 green cards that were lost due to bureaucratic error in the past decades. Congressional action could recapture up to 339,000 to 940,000 green cards. Historically this policy has garnered bipartisan support and proves a strong potential pathway to expanding immigration. Expanding green card limits themselves would probably face more opposition in Congress, but it is nevertheless a pertinent issue to address, given that green card limits have not been expanded for decades, despite the growth in population.
An especially egregious and costly area where Biden has failed is in not revoking Presidential Proclamation 10043, an order by Trump that denies visas to Chinese graduate research students from select universities purely on the basis of their country of origin. All that matters is whether one studied at a university that receives money from the Chinese Government — in one example, a student who received their Ph.D. in the US was denied a visa due to having received his Master’s degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in China. This is an absurd policy that prevents incredibly educated and ambitious people that are seeking to contribute to the United States come to the United States, based purely on their nationality. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Chinese researchers lead in research on artificial intelligence for America and are among the top authors in papers for many other fields. It is an absolute travesty that Biden has not removed this blatantly racist and counterproductive policy.
