Who is being hurt the most by the administration’s rush to give work permits to tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens it’s ushering illegally into the United States each month? Immigrants who follow the rules.
Most in the media focus solely on those crossing the border illegally, which is why last January, the White House began hiding the scope of its border disaster by funneling migrants through the legal ports of entry instead.
That effort was successful until my colleague Todd Bensman blew the lid off a Biden scheme that allows hundreds of thousands of nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly directly to interior US airports, under a policy with the anodyne name “CHNV parole.”
CHNV parole — which Congress has never authorized — allows up to 360,000 nationals of those four countries to enter the United States annually, despite the fact that the Department of Homeland Security recently had to admit that all of them “are, by definition, inadmissible.”
That inconvenient fact aside, each one of them is allowed to seek a work permit here.
As bad as that is, it pales in comparison to a different — and even bigger — Biden scheme you’ve probably never heard of.
It enables up to 1,400 would-be illegal migrants per day (a half-million-plus per year) to schedule appointments at the southwest border ports of entry using the “CBP One mobile app.”
Nearly 96% of them are also paroled into the United States, and all of them, again, can seek work permits here. You can also add them to the tens of thousands of other aliens apprehended by Border Patrol and released into the country monthly despite also being inadmissible.
Not surprisingly, allowing nearly 900,000 “parolees” annually to seek work permits has imposed significant burdens on US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency charged with adjudicating those requests.
Biden’s USCIS, however, has responded by expediting those parolee work permits.
According to DHS’s own stats, it took the agency on average of more than six months to adjudicate a work permit application (Form I-765) for a parolee under Trump in FY 2019.
By the first quarter of FY 2024, after parolee work requests skyrocketed under these Biden schemes, USCIS had that decision time down to 27 days.
Taxpayers may laud the agency’s newfound efficiency, but here’s the problem: While USCIS has whittled down the time it takes to issue work permits to aliens with no right to be here, the agency’s delay in adjudicating applications for legal immigrants has subsequently soared.
You’re a US citizen and want to bring your alien fiancée to the United States? USCIS took 5.2 months to adjudicate those “Form I-129F” applications in FY 2019, while today it takes 9.6 months — an 84% increase.
What about your alien spouse? Such I-130 “Petitions for Alien Relative” were adjudicated in 8.6 months under President Donald Trump, but it now takes USCIS more than 11 months to process them — 29% longer and an increase that seems like an eternity for couples looking to build a new life together.
It’s no wonder aliens abroad skip immigrating “the right way” and instead pay smugglers to help them “jump the line.”
Entering “the right way” is for suckers.
Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
