San José. – In the campaign that ended with his electoral victory in November 2020, Joe Biden he promised that as president he would “immediately cancel the draconian” or cruel migration policies of Donald Trump with Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans and that they would attack the misery and insecurity of visa-free migrant caravans from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador A US.
newspaper Washington Post some of the main ideas of Biden’s plan, which includes an eight-year path for migrants to obtain citizenship, will be released yesterday and will be sent to Congress, which must approve it.
The idea is to allow MIGRANT They are eligible for legal permanent residence after five years of life in the United States if they meet certain requirements, such as background checks and tax payments. They could apply for citizenship three years later. Another qualification requirement, which seeks to avoid waves of immigration, is for applicants to be in that country from at least 1 January.
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The new migrants could not apply to Biden’s plan. Beneficiaries of the program IF: Young migrants who came to the United States as children, brought by their parents, as well as beneficiaries 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 officials.
Although the closure of borders to deal with Covid-19 partially contained the flow of irregular passengers from Central America, Cuba, Haiti, Africa and Asia to Mexico and the United States, Biden will take the lead. White House faced with the re-enactment of migration issues in the face of the regional worsening of the socio-economic crisis due to the pandemic, such as caravans that left Honduras in the first half of January 2021.
Trump “left a disastrous legacy” and “a short-sighted approach to migration,” The Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (WOLA), a non-state institution that evaluates human rights in the western hemisphere.
In a report on Biden’s challenges to the oval office, WOLA said that with the “increasing number of migrants” in mid-2020, Biden and Congress “must move fast” to end the “attacks” Trump’s deadly. against asylum seekers ”.
“Even Biden will not be able to open the doors of migrants,” the Guatemalan sociologist clarified Carmen Rosa de Leon, executive director of the (non-static) Institute for Education for Sustainable Development in Guatemala.
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“We are looking for a more humane immigration reform, without repression and without allowing the masses of migrants to enter the United States. It will not radically change the possibility of entry, that it will not want to open borders or that the change will be interpreted as implying that anyone can enter, illegally, or that the country will be less harsh with migrants, “said De León. universal.
Means
Biden has pledged to tackle poverty, violence and insecurity as the roots of the migration drama and to propose a $ 4 billion socio-economic assistance plan for Central America, with a focus on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as The northern triangle, to discourage the emergence of mobilizations that, through illegal means, are trying to enter the country from Mexico.
“May be [con Biden] the subhuman conditions and the concentration camps and torture that Trump has established are disappearing, “said Guatemalan social communicator Iduvina Hernández, executive director of [no estatal] Guatemala Association for the Study and Promotion of Security in Democracy. Recalling that during the Barack Obama administration (2009-2017) there were mass deportations of Central Americans, Hernández explained to this newspaper that the expulsions would continue because “the arrival of a new government will not change this. The persecution of illegal migration will continue. “
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“It simply came to our notice then. [Estados Unidos] stop using Central American governments as immigration police and let them stop violating their own internal mobility treaties, ”he said.
by Nicaragua, the triangle draws decades of social injustice, dictatorships, militarism, corruption and impunity and in all four, with updated figures of 40.9 million inhabitants by 2021, more than half of its inhabitants survive in misery and exclusion and expel expeditions of marginalized Central Americans who choose to embark on a dangerous journey by land to Mexico and that nation.
A mixture of official and informal calculations has shown that, legally or illegally, there are approximately 7 million Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans living in the United States, who in 2020 contributed $ 22 billion to their countries’ savings in family remittances, after sending $ 211,681 million in 2019.