In a long-awaited announcement Tuesday, President Joe Biden unveiled an executive action that would grant the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens who’ve lived in the country for 10 or more years, as well as their children under 21, a designation known as parole-in-place. This in turn will clear the path for applications for permanent residence and, eventually, citizenship.
This order is about one simple thing: Should people who have long lived in the United States, who have built lives here with American citizen spouses and very often children, pursuing their own version of the American dream, be allowed to access the process that they are legally entitled to anyway?
Because, let’s not forget, parole-in-place is not creating a new pathway to citizenship, as it’s being largely and erroneously described. It is allowing undocumented people to avail themselves of the existing system for families of U.S. citizens, which has been part of the country’s immigration framework for more than seven decades.
The reason that people couldn’t do this is because we’ve created a contradictory system that opens up pathways and punishes people for using them. Under current law, even though residency is available for people married to citizens and their children, the application must be done either entirely from outside the country, or after a person has re-entered the country legally.
That seems easy enough, except for the fact that leaving the United States after having been present unlawfully for a year or more triggers a 10-year ban on re-entry. The process to grant exemptions is cumbersome, slow and simply unnecessary.