by Phillip Linderman at Center for Immigration Studies
DHS Secretary Mayorkas has turned “humanitarian and public interest parole” into a mass-migration tool that is overwhelming America’s lawful immigration system.
As CIS scholars have thoroughly documented, the Mayorkas parolee-migration programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, and other foreign nationals are making a shambles of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). For example, DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, already overwhelmed in carrying out its normal statutory duties of processing legitimate citizenship and residency cases, is being pulled further underwater in trying to manage hundreds of thousands of parolees and parole applicants.
The DHS secretary believes that the INA admits too few migrants and requires procedures that are too slow and cumbersome. Mayorkas’s parolees are admitted in a process that runs separately from, and parallel to, normal immigrant visa processing. Through his radical abuse of parole powers, the DHS secretary not only wants to overturn INA-established family-reunification visa caps, but also demonstrate the “brokenness” of the entire immigrant visa process. He is implicitly questioning the very concept of an immigrant visa.
After all, Mayorkas can argue, if DHS can fast track hundreds of thousands of de facto parolee-migrants, using online applications, without any of them undergoing any conventional immigrant visa screening, what purpose does the INA’s “antiquated” visa regime system serve?…
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