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As expected, Joe Biden issued an executive order yesterday that protects the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, as long as those undocumented spouses have been in the country for 10 years, as well as the children of such marriages. The actual XO has not been posted to the federal register yet, but here is the fact sheet published by the White House.
We wrote a somewhat substantive item about this yesterday, but we are returning to it again in order to add and/or clarify a few things now that fuller information is available. To start, it was initially estimated that the new XO would affect about 750,000 people. According to the White House, it's actually more like 550,000, with 500,000 of those being spouses and 50,000 being children.
Second, the White House tossed in a little something extra that was not a part of the pre-XO coverage. In addition to helping out the spouses/children (we called them "DASAs" in our item yesterday), the administration is going to make it a bit easier for DACAs who have graduated college and have received job offers to renew and extend their visas.
Third, we got a number of questions along the lines of this one from reader I.K. in Queens, NY:
I'm confused about Biden's program to give spouses a path to citizenship. My understanding was that the surefire way to get a green card was to marry a U.S. citizen. So wouldn't all those spouses of U.S. citizens already be on the fast track to citizenship? What's actually changing?
Being married to a U.S. citizen does ease the process of getting a green card (a.k.a. lawful permanent resident status) and of getting U.S. citizenship, but it's not a guarantee. And even when it does grease the skids, the process has to start with a person who has followed all the rules, and did not enter the U.S. illegally. Here's what the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says:
The spouse of a U.S. citizen who resides in the United States may be eligible for naturalization on the basis of his or her marriage. The spouse must have continuously resided in the United States after becoming a lawful permanent resident (LPR) for at least 3 years immediately preceding the date of filing the naturalization application and must have lived in marital union with his or her citizen spouse for at least those 3 years.
If you click on the link, there is also a long list of other requirements for gaining citizenship, like "Attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States during all relevant periods under the law." In any case, as the 550,000 people did not have LPR status on entry, and could not acquire it after arriving, this path to citizenship was not available to them. So, Biden opened a new path (one that, as we noted, has previously been available to military spouses).
After Biden made the XO official, many Republicans cried foul, and claimed it was an election ploy. Boy, nothing gets by them. We wrote at length yesterday about the political calculations on display here, and how this mirrors a similar set of calculations done by Barack Obama in 2012. All we can add today is that: (1) "I think this is politically beneficial" and (2) "I think this is the right thing to do" are not necessarily mutually exclusive propositions. We will note that, for some Republicans, the "political calculation" is that Biden is trying to let undocumented immigrants vote for him. This is dumb; the 550,000 people are already in the country, and are no more or less able to vote today than they were yesterday, and none of them are going to get citizenship in the next 5 months (it's a minimum 3-year process).
And speaking of the politics of the XO, Politico's Myah Ward has a piece, based on interviews with insiders, that brings up an important dimension that we really should have noticed, but that we missed. By taking action to keep families together, the White House is trying to create a contrast with Donald Trump's family separation/put children in cages approach to the border. You can bet good money that Biden will find a way to fit that exact framing into the debate next week. (Z)