By the time President-elect Joe Biden takes office, President Donald Trump will have reduced legal immigration by up to 49%, Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes. Biden will inherit a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) backlog, a gutted visa system for skilled workers, travel bans affecting millions of Americans and their families, a university system bereft of international students, and the responsibility for the fates of hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. "Analysts believe if the Biden administration is smart, it will make a clean break from the Trump era by undoing all executive orders and proclamations on immigration that are not directly tied to health concerns related to Covid-19," Anderson writes.

Matt Viser, Seung Min Kim and Annie Linskey at The Washington Post report that the Biden-Harris team is planning to do just that. "He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans."

Politico’s Rebecca Rainey and Bryan Bender write that "[i]mmigration policy would be the most dramatic and immediate reversal of Trump policies when Biden takes office."

As we noted following the news of Biden’s victory, Americans across the political spectrum want an immigration approach that re-establishes our values of compassion, dignity and opportunity. Republicans and Democrats in Congress should find common ground to create immigration policies that benefit all of us. For my part, I couldn’t help but think about the millions of immigrants — supported by conservatives, moderates and liberals — who can finally breathe deeply.

Welcome to Monday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

Category: "The Future of Immigration Policy"

The Answer: "Leading the Way, Week of Nov. 16." (Registration is free)

The Question: "Where are 35 speakers gathering over 13 panels to discuss the future of American immigration?"

(Thank you, Alex — Canadian immigrant, naturalized U.S. citizen — for the decades of joy.)

NEW AMERICAN VICTORIES – I love this story: Numerous first- and second-generation Americans were elected to office this week in historic races across the country, Rupa Shenoy reports for The World. "Samba Baldeh, an immigrant from The Gambia, will represent a mostly white area in the Wisconsin Legislature as its first Muslim member. Naquetta Ricks, a refugee from Liberia, is joining the Colorado House. Kesha Ram, the daughter of an Indian immigrant father and Jewish American mother, is now the first woman of color in the Vermont Senate. Iman Jodeh, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and refugees, is now Colorado’s first Muslim lawmaker." Beyond their immigrant status, the newly elected officials also share the same goals: "to defend democracy, diversity and inclusiveness."

SOUTH TEXAS VOTE – Around 25-30% of Latino voters nationwide have supported Republican candidates for decades, "but many Democrats said they were particularly alarmed by the loss of support in the Rio Grande Valley, where Mr. Biden won some border counties by significantly smaller margins than Hillary Clinton did in 2016," reports Jennifer Medina for The New York Times. Gilberto Hinojosa, Texas Democratic Party chairman and Rio Grande Valley resident, attributes Biden’s lackluster performance in South Texas to a missed opportunity to "counter Republican messaging on three issues important to Latino voters: pandemic shutdowns, oil jobs and abortion," Elizabeth Findell writes in The Wall Street Journal. President Trump’s messaging around
abortion, unauthorized immigrants and border security may have also broken through to South Texas Latino voters, according to a deep dive by the Dallas Morning News. "There is a divide between an RGV Latino voter and a Dallas County or Harris County Latino voter," said Antonion Arellano, interim executive director of the progressive Latino group Jolt Action. "We need to recognize that Texas is the size of three Georgias — it’s a massive state. Latinos in the North, in the East, in the West and in the South of Texas all have different motivators that are driving them out to vote."

TPS TORN APART – There’s a vast array of immigration challenges facing the president-elect, Monica Rhor writes in the Houston Chronicle. "But it is the TPS recipient, along with the DACA ‘dreamer,’ who could have lives already rooted in this country torn apart." As it stands now, "TPS holders from Sudan, Nicaragua and Haiti may have to leave as soon as March. About 200,000 from El Salvador, the largest group of TPS holders, would have until November 2021." Asked Bernardo Castaneda, a Salvadoran TPS recipient who fled to the U.S. with his family decades ago: "How do you prepare yourself in 11 months to take with you 20 years of your life?"

OTHER BARRIERS – President Trump has only built about 597 kilometers of physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico, but built a more effective barrier through "an intricate web of executive actions, administrative orders and agreements with other countries obtained through threats," write Lorena Arroyo, Hector Guerrero and Teresa de Miguel for El País. Even with a Biden win, they write, immigration and asylum law experts feel that some of the Trump administration’s changes could take a long time to revert and will have long-term effects on the U.S. immigration system. "The US government is placing all the obstacles it can and making people suffer inhumanly with the goal of getting them to stop coming. It’s a way of closing the border," said Jodi Goodwill, a veteran immigration lawyer from Texas.

Thanks for reading,

Ali