Richard Fein’s latest anti-immigration column (“Grading the Biden presidency to date,” April 25) leaves out a few crucial facts.
1. Seeking asylum is legal under both U.S. and international law, which Trump broke and Biden has not successfully reversed yet. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. pushed hard (successfully), to get other countries to agree to fair treatment of refugees, but since 2017, the U.S. seems to think this international agreement doesn’t apply to our own country.
2. What Biden promised during the 2020 election campaign was to restore some normalcy to an immigration process that his predecessor deliberately broke. Under Trump, longstanding immigration policies were torn up and illegally replaced with open racism. Biden’s small (and in our view, inadequate) steps are an attempt to return to the pre-Trump status quo and replace that vicious racism with some humanity.
3. Under Trump, the path of legal immigration was almost entirely eliminated for people of color, and Biden has not done enough to restore it. Thus, going through legal channels has not been an option for most immigrants.
4. Doctors and public health experts have agreed since 2019 that Title 42 was never really a public health measure but was one more method used to keep immigrants and asylum seekers out. COVID tests, vaccines, and quarantines can do the same job. Title 42 was one more attempt by the Trump administration to keep Black and brown people out of this country. If it were really a public health measure, it would apply to Ukrainian immigrants as well. We are glad that Ukrainian refugees are finding a warm welcome — and that same warm welcome should be extended to the Black and brown victims of persecution and violence, hunger and poverty resulting from climate change. The Biden administration has continued the racist application of this regulation.
5. MPP, also known as Remain in Mexico, was a complete failure. Migrants who should have been able to declare asylum were not allowed to cross, not allowed to declare, and sent to horribly unsafe conditions in refugee camps on the Mexican side of the border. Many were kidnapped, robbed, raped, and even murdered. This is blood on our hands, as U.S. citizens — because our government enabled this mayhem.
Fein refers to the problem of “illegals,” but most of the migrants at our border would prefer a legal option. Under Trump, that was essentially nonexistent, and under Biden, it is extremely limited and requires enormous amounts of documentation to be submitted in a language not their own, to specific and complex legal standards that are not easy to assemble when fleeing for one’s life.
Annique Boomsma, of Pelham, is a member of the Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice of Western Massachusetts. This column was submitted with the unanimous consent of the group’s full membership.