San José. – In the campaign that ended with its electoral triumph in November 2020, Joe Biden promised that as president he would “destroy the draconians immediately” or cruelly migration policy from Donald Trump with Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans, and that it would address the misery and uncertainty that the caravans of migrants Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador a U.S.
The newspaper The Washington Post Yesterday, some of the key ideas of Biden’s plan erupted, including an eight-year trajectory for migrants to obtain citizenship and going to the Congress, which it must approve.
The idea is to allow migrants To be eligible for legal permanent residence after living in the United States for five years, if they meet certain requirements, such as a background check and payment of taxes. Three years later they were able to apply for citizenship. Another eligibility requirement, which aims to avoid waves of immigration, is that applicants must have resided in that country at least since January 1 last year.
Also read: Mexico asks to stop migrating caravans
New migrants could not apply to Biden’s plan. The beneficiaries of the program ALSYoung migrants who came to the United States as children, brought by their parents, and recipients of TPS, the program for migrants from countries affected by natural disasters, could immediately apply for legal residence, the Post explained. based on information from transition team officers.
While the closure of the borders to cope with Covid-19 has partially curbed the flow of irregular travelers from Central America, Cuba, Haiti, Africa and Asia to Mexico and the United States, Biden will take the helm of the White House faced with the reissue of migration issues in light of the regional worsening socio-economic crisis due to the pandemic, such as the caravans leaving Honduras in the first half of January 2021.
Trump “left a catastrophic legacy” and “a shortsighted approach to migration,” said the Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (WOLA), a non-government agency that evaluates human rights in the Western Hemisphere.
In a report on Biden’s challenges arriving at the Oval Office, WOLA indicated that, with “migration numbers increasing since mid-2020,” Biden and Congress must “act quickly” to end “the deadly attacks from Trump “. against asylum seekers ”.
“Biden will also not be able to open the doors to migrants,” the Guatemalan sociologist explained. Carmen Rosa de Leon, executive director of the (non-state) Institute of Education for Sustainable Development of Guatemala.
Also read: Caravan tries to bypass the controls and travel to Tabasco and Chiapas today
“The aim is for more humane immigration reform, without repression and without allowing masses of migrants to enter the United States. It will not radically change the possibility of entry, that it will not open borders or that the change will be interpreted as implying that anyone can enter illegally or that the country will be less harsh on migrants, ” said De León. THE UNIVERSAL.
Resources
Biden has guaranteed that he will tackle the problems of poverty, violence and insecurity at the root of the migration drama and that he will propose a $ 4 billion socio-economic support plan for Central America, with an emphasis on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as Northern triangle, to discourage the emergence of mobilizations attempting to enter the country from Mexico by illegal means.
“Could be [con Biden] the inhumane conditions and nearing the concentration and torture camps that Trump has set up are disappearing, ” claimed Guatemalan social communicator Iduvina Hernández, executive director of the [no estatal] Guatemala Association for the Study and Promotion of Security in Democracy. Recalling that massive deportations of Central Americans took place during the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017), Hernández explained to this paper that the deportations will continue because “it is not the arrival of a new government that will change that. . The prosecution of irregular migration will continue ”.
Also read: Guatemalan authorities forcibly detain the Honduran migrant caravan
“Desirable that [Estados Unidos] stop using Central American governments as immigration police and stop them violating their own internal mobility treaties, ”he said.
Next Nicaraguathe triangle drags decades of social injustice, dictatorships, militarism, corruption and impunity and in all four, with updated figures from 40.9 million residents to 2021, more than half of the residents live in misery and exclusion and swell on expeditions of marginalized Central Americans choosing to embark on a dangerous overland journey to Mexico and that country.
A mixture of official and unofficial calculations showed that, legally or illegally, about 7 million Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans live in the United States, who contributed about $ 22 billion to their country’s economies by 2020 through family remittances after sending 21 thousand to $ 681 million in 2019.