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It could also modernize the way the U.S. government keeps track of asylum cases and of the migrants themselves, making the whole process more smooth. Some immigrants’ rights groups, including the American Immigration Council, have raised valid questions about how the government will use the GPS coordinates and biometric data collected by the app.
But CBP One has the potential to be transformative, in a good way. Hundreds of people die every year making the dangerous journey to the United States. Imagine if they could get an appointment to file an asylum claim without ever having to put themselves in harm’s way.
For those who have already walked through jungles to reach the border, news of the app is likely to be a heartbreak. Until recently, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans stood a good chance of gaining admittance to the United States; it is difficult to deport them because of their countries’ frosty relations with the United States. But under Mr. Biden’s new plan, the Mexican government will accept up to 30,000 people from these three countries and Haiti per month, effectively crushing their hopes of ever reaching America.
This aspect of the new program has outraged human rights activists, leading some to compare Mr. Biden to the former guy. But the comparison isn’t fair. Overall, the Biden administration did a decent job of reversing the cruelty-is-the-point Trump-era policies that separated parents from their small children, made undocumented workers live in constant fear of deportation and slashed refugee admissions.
However, Mr. Biden’s efforts to restore the image of America as a big-hearted and welcoming country come with a downside. Migrants in Mexico had high hopes when Mr. Biden took office that he would immediately change policies to let them in. Since then, more than a million asylum-seekers have been allowed into the United States with notices to appear in court for cases that most likely won’t be called up for years.
As some American schools and homeless shelters are inundated with migrants, public opinion seems to be shifting even further in favor of stronger restrictions at the border. The percentage of people who say that increasing security along the U.S.-Mexico border to reduce illegal crossings “should be an important goal” has risen to 73 percent from 68 percent three years ago, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. The increase is largely driven by Democrats (59 percent today vs. 49 percent then).
Now Mr. Biden is scrambling to try to reduce the numbers of migrants who cross the border. “He knows how border issues have crippled presidencies,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “He doesn’t want to be stamped with this brand of an unmanageable border.”
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