Washington.- President Biden announced Tuesday an initiative that could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of undocumented young adults, known as Dreamers, whose ability to live and work in the United States has long been tied to a temporary immigration program that has been on life support.
The new directive will allow many beneficiaries of an Obama-era program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to quickly receive employer-sponsored work visas for the first time. Over time, young immigrants could apply through their employers for a green card, or legal permanent residence.
The new policy is one of two new immigration measures the Administration announced Tuesday. It means that a generation of young people who entered the country illegally as children will no longer depend on whether the DACA program, implemented as a temporary solution in 2012 and mired in complex litigation ever since, survives or dies.
For many, the program has allowed them to remain in the only country they really know. Sebastián Meléndez, a 25-year-old registered nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, said his DACA status had allowed him to work alongside surgeons performing innovative gastrointestinal procedures, buy a car, rent an apartment and help his parents financially.
But as the program was alternately stopped and renewed by the courts, it has faced a constant threat of possible deportation.
“It would be amazing to have this employment visa solution, instead of a status that has been hanging by a thread,” said Mr. Melendez, whose parents brought him to the United States when he was a baby.
Until now, immigrants enrolled in the DACA program could live and work temporarily in the United States, but their situation was always precarious and they had no avenue to apply for permanent legal residence or citizenship.
The White House has now ordered federal agencies to expedite the process for undocumented college graduates to obtain official work visas, a process that until now was largely unattainable for most of them because they were living in the country illegally.
Business owners have been wary of sponsoring undocumented immigrants for work visas because it required applicants to leave the United States and obtain a waiver from U.S. consular officials in another country for legal readmission to the United States. .
Historically, immigrants have been reluctant to apply for these types of visas due to the risk of being stranded abroad or being denied re-entry.
However, under the new guidelines, consular officials abroad should aim to grant the exemption within days or weeks, rather than months or years.
It has not yet been detailed who can benefit from the new program. The number of work visas could be limited and distributed by job categories.
“It’s a small step in a complex immigration system that can pave the way for many people to obtain a work visa more quickly,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.
At a ceremony Tuesday in the East Room of the White House marking the 12th anniversary of DACA, Mr. Biden said the new measures would “clarify and expedite work visas to help people, including Dreamers, who are “They have graduated from American colleges and universities to obtain jobs in high-demand, high-skill professions.”
Some companies applauded the measure.
“The importance of having some hope of certainty and a path to stability for Dreamers cannot be overstated,” said Jack Chen, associate general counsel for U.S. immigration at Microsoft.
The DACA program was born out of former President Barack Obama’s frustration with Congress’s repeated and failed attempts to overhaul the broken immigration system. The Dreamers – brought illegally to the United States without their choosing – were often considered the most sympathetic group of unauthorized immigrants by politicians on both sides.
Since 2012, the program has protected more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation and provided work permits. Every two years, beneficiaries must pay to renew their participation.
Critics of the new measure said it went against the stated intent of the program when it was created – to provide a temporary solution for undocumented youth.
“The program was defended as something that would not lead to permanent status,” said Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston. “Now those guardrails are being pushed aside.”
For many young people who grew up in the United States, the ability to work legally without fear of deportation has been transformative. They have become nurses, teachers and doctors, and have bought houses and paid taxes.
Many beneficiaries were teenagers when the program was introduced. The oldest were just over 30 years old, and today they are around 40 years old.
But for years, DACA recipients have been on a roller coaster ride, as the program has been canceled, reinstated and partly rolled back by court rulings and administrative actions. The Trump administration tried to end it, and several states, led by Texas, have sued to overturn it.
The program remains immersed in legal challenges that will most likely be decided by the Supreme Court. It has been closed to new applicants since July 2021 by court order, leaving some 480,000 young immigrants disenfranchised. The number of active beneficiaries has been reduced to around 500,000, according to official data.
Untold numbers of recipients have found themselves caught up in bureaucracy, and lost their jobs when their renewals were not completed by the time their DACA work permits expired.
In one such case, Kai Martin, 40, a DACA recipient who lives in Washington, D.C., lost her job five months ago because her renewal was delayed. She finally received her new work authorization two weeks ago, but the nonprofit she worked for had been unable to keep her position.
“I lost my health benefits, I didn’t qualify for unemployment,” said Ms. Martin, whose mother brought her to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago when she was 11 years old. “She was once again an undocumented person with nothing.”
Ms. Martin, who has a master’s degree in public policy, said she was excited about the new measure but was unsure if it would apply to someone with her skill set. “Until the criteria are clarified, I’m not sure this is going to help me,” she said.
The idea of expediting the granting of regular work visas to Dreamers came about two years ago, when Dan Berger, an immigration fellow at Cornell Law School, proposed the idea to his colleagues. He and others sent a memo to the White House in late 2022 outlining an idea they said would benefit both Dreamers and companies looking to hire them.
Mr. Berger tested the waters by helping some employers, including two hospitals, sponsor work visas for DACA recipients under the old rules.
One of them was granted a waiver in just two weeks, while another is still waiting for a visa, more than seven months later.
“The administration was able to see that this could work, but that it needed to take steps to streamline the process,” Mr. Berger said. “That happened today.”
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