White House Creates New Migration Paths Without OK from Congress; U.S. Considers Expanding Asylum Program for Venezuelans to Include Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans

White House Creates New Migration Paths Without OK from Congress:

President Joe Biden’s deputies are redirecting their chaotic flood of illegal economic migrants into quiet, quasi-legal pipelines while they lift the Title 42 border barrier, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

The plan could quickly deliver hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans into the U.S. economy, regardless of Congress’ annual caps on migration.

“How can we build a lawful pathway for individuals so that they don’t have to traverse dangerous terrain in the hands of smugglers, but rather, [so] we can prequalify them [for entry],” the Cuban-born border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, told the El Paso Matters newspaper on December 15. He continued:

We can vet and screen them beforehand [outside the United States], assess their eligibility, and then have them travel safely to the United States to ports of entry in the interior by plane, which is what we’ve seen in a tremendously successful program for [24,000] Venezuelans.

The administration is “trying to change the way immigration policy is made without consulting Congress,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Congress has set a limit of roughly one million immigrants each year, said Krikorian:

They are trying to see if they can get away with the kind of thing that the Executive [branch] got away with the [constitutional] war-making power. The [constitutional requirement of a] declaration of war is now an archaic thing like something of Edward Gibbon [1776 author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] … What they would like is to effect the same kind of de-facto constitutional change without having anybody actually vote on it.

Mayorkas is allowing “pseudo-legal immigration because he’s using the pretense that it is legal,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government affairs for NumbersUSA. “The sky’s the limit in Mayorkas’ mind because he’s an open-borders zealot,” she added.

Mayorkas’s new asylum and parole pipelines are already operational, likely illegal, and corrupt — and they also offer Americans little except lower wages and higher rents. —>READ MORE HERE

U.S. Considers Expanding Asylum Program for Venezuelans to Include Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans:

U.S. officials are moving to expand a program creating a legal process for Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum to also include Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians, amid a surge in Nicaraguan migrants that has begun to overwhelm parts of the border in recent days.

The humanitarian program would allow migrants from those countries to apply from abroad to fly to the U.S., according to internal government documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal and two officials familiar with the plans.

The new program, the administration plans to argue, would give migrants from those countries an alternative path into the U.S. so they don’t attempt to cross the southern border illegally.

The new program represents one of several border-policy changes the Biden administration is weighing ahead of the scheduled expiration of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allows border patrol agents to rapidly expel migrants back to Mexico. That policy is set to end Dec. 21. Officials are looking for numerous ways—including new deterrence measures—to limit overcrowding in border facilities amid an expected rise in illegal crossings once the policy is formally lifted.

Two government officials cautioned that discussions are ongoing and plans could change before next week.

In El Paso, a group of about 1,000 mostly Nicaraguan asylum seekers crossed the border Sunday, lining up on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande to surrender to waiting Border Patrol agents. So far this month, more than 25,000 migrants have been arrested after crossing the border into the city and Border Patrol agents have released more than 11,000 migrants, according to data published by the city of El Paso —>READ MORE HERE

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