President-elect Joe Biden will likely take office with a Republican Senate, which could make comprehensive immigration reform challenging. A new report from the Migration Policy Institute offers a blueprint for exactly where Biden could start: Deprioritize the removal of undocumented immigrants who are not public safety threats, reopen DACA applications, raise the annual refugee cap and treat asylum seekers more humanely. 

"[T]he incoming administration faces opportunities to work with Congress to build a 21st century immigration system, one with an immigrant selection system that can flexibly respond to changing economic and labor market conditions, that creates a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants who are contributing members of U.S. society, and that rethinks its visa categories to attract and retain desired global talent," report authors Doris Meissner and Michelle Mittelstadt write. 

"[B]ecause immigration is an area where presidents exercise a vast amount of discretion, it’s also one where incoming President Joe Biden can do a lot executively to reverse some of the most heinous excesses of the Trump years," Greg Sargent writes in a column for The Washington Post. 

These changes, Sargent writes, would signal that far from a force to be feared, "immigration can and should be managed humanely with an eye toward what’s truly in the public interest."

As Meissner and Mittelstadt conclude, the timing couldn’t be more urgent to begin taking steps toward reform: "The reopening of countries after the forced immobility imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, labor force realignments as automation and offshoring leave their mark, the growing global hunt for talent, and the aging of U.S. society are among the urgent reminders that the United States needs active, intelligent management of its immigration system—and the flexibility to adapt and adjust as conditions change."

Don’t forget: Next week, we’re bringing together influential speakers from a variety of backgrounds for our annual Leading the Way convening. Join us from 3-5 p.m. ET from Nov. 16-19 for conversations on the post-election path forward, American identity amid polarization, the new economics of immigration and more. Registration is free — see you there!

Welcome to Tuesday’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].

‘BALM FOR THE SOUL’ – Yesterday’s news that a COVID-19 vaccine candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech achieved 90% effectiveness in a phase 3 trial was both a triumph of human ingenuity as well as an incredible immigrant success story. BioNTech founders Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin’s backgrounds as children of Turkish guest workers who came to Germany in the late 1960s is significant, Philip Oltermann writes for The Guardian. "In a country where a debate about the willingness of German citizens with Turkish roots to integrate into public life has never been far from the headlines for the last decade, the story of BioNTech’s founders is also salient." In April, Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel "wrote that their success was ‘balm for the soul’ of Germans with Turkish roots after decades of being stereotyped as lowly educated greengrocers." Now, they may quite literally save the world.

666 CHILDREN – Lawyers working to reunite separated migrant children with their parents now say 666 children are stranded as a result of the Trump administration’s "zero-tolerance" policy, Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley report for NBC News. "Nearly 20 percent, or 129, of those children were under 5 at the time of the separation, according to a source familiar with the data." Steven Herzog, the attorney leading efforts to reunite the families, explained that the number is higher than the initially reported 545 separated children because the new group includes those "for whom the government did not provide any phone number." Said Herzog in an email to Justice Department attorneys: "[W]e would appreciate the government providing any available updated contact information, or other information that may be helpful in establishing contact for all 666 of these parents."