Biden has always opposed the strict immigration policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and stressed on the first day of his presidency that he would take action on them immediately. Legalizing illegal immigrants, nearly half of whom are from Mexico, has long been a priority for democratic and liberal politicians who believe that illegal immigrants contribute to the economy while the number of illegal immigrants is declining.
Trump card
On the one hand, Trump has spearheaded verbal expulsions to expel and stop illegal immigrants since his 2016 election campaign. He will also build a wall along the Mexican border. In practice, deportations of illegal immigrants were behind Trump’s threats. Under his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, nearly three times as many illegal immigrants were deported in his first term compared to that of the Trump administration.
If the number of illegal immigrants could be inferred from the number of deportations, then there would actually be fewer. In 2010, the United States expelled an estimated 230,000 people without residency, and in 2020 it expelled more than 50,000.
The dreamers
Biden now wants to stop the deportation and effectively arrange an amnesty, also for the so-called “dreamers”. This is the hundreds of thousands of people who came illegally as children and started their lives as adults in the United States. They enjoyed legal protection until 2017 when the Trump administration repealed it.
It is not known how many illegal persons are in the United States. Most estimates estimate between ten and twelve million people. They include nearly two million people from Central America (mainly El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and nearly a million and a half from Asia.
According to the researchers, most of the illegal immigrants have been in the United States for a very long time, with an estimated two-thirds of them being more than ten years old. However, in the United States there are a lot of “newcomers” in the population. For example, out of approximately 330 million people, about 45 million were not born in the United States.
