Biden’s Parole Scheme Isn’t Reducing Illegal Immigration, It’s Enabling More Of It
While New York City officials cry uncle over the massive and costly influx of migrants in their midst, a scholar cosseted in the Manhattan Institute’s ivory tower is praising the Biden administration’s immigrant parole program for “successfully reducing both illegal immigration and total immigration into the U.S.”
Daniel Di Martino writes that the parole program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (CHNV) “prevented the entry of more than 380,000 illegal immigrants into the United States.” Di Martino, who arrived in this country from Venezuela in 2016 and evidently has imbibed a few too many Manhattans, is simply parroting the Biden administration’s tortured logic.
In fact, as FAIR has noted, Biden & Co. have made a mockery of a statutorily limited parole program, usurped congressional intent, and implemented industrial-scale processing of aliens through executive fiat.
Though Di Martino doesn’t mention it, Biden’s extra-legal parole program provides easy pickings for pedophiles and human traffickers posing as financial sponsors. Though they are supposed to help provide transportation, housing, employment, health care, schooling, etc., bad actors with ulterior motives can work parole to prey on children and exploit vulnerable adults, FAIR reported earlier this year.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says it requires sponsors to pass security screening and background vetting. Yet these are the same assurances the administration made for Afghan nationals paroled into the U.S. back in 2021, when unaccompanied children were placed with criminals.
In reality, USCIS doesn’t collect enough information to investigate sponsors, and open-borders activists facilitating the ongoing flood of illegal aliens have an inside track for the bulk of sponsorships.
Biden and Di Martino blithely assert that the vastly expanded parole program is “safe, orderly, and humane.” But it’s actually a boondoggle that endangers aliens and provides no “significant public benefit” to Americans (a provision of Congress’ parole law).
As Elizabeth Jacobs of the Center for Immigration Studies says, “An unlawful grant of parole does not cure the border crisis, it only changes how the government is required to report the information to the public.”
If Di Martino truly wants to reduce illegal immigration in his adopted country, he could start by acknowledging that an ad hoc parole scheme has precisely the opposite effect.
Instead, the Biden administration should be expediting removals (as required by the Immigration and Nationality Act), detaining asylum seekers until their claims are adjudicated (also required by the INA), reinstituting the Remain in Mexico program (expressly authorized by statute), and requiring foreign nationals seeking entry to apply for the appropriate visas from their home countries.
In short: Enforce existing immigration law.
The Manhattan Institute, which purports to advocate for “the rule of law in America and its great cities,” should try it.