The New Yorker:

President Biden has offered help to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, in the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade.

By Jonathan Blitzer

The American immigration system has been called many unsavory things, most of them deserved. It was last reformed thirty-four years ago. What has emerged in the decades since is a welter of backlogs, visa shortages, piecemeal enforcement measures, and every manner of bureaucratic complexity. Ordinary people, trying to work and take care of their families, are often forced into surreal scenarios. Take the 1.1 ­million people in this country who are married to U.S. citizens but are undocumented themselves. You might assume that it would be relatively straightforward for them to get on firm legal footing. In fact, the process is quite complicated. Anyone who first entered the United States illegally must travel to another country for a visa interview at a U.S. Embassy or consulate. But if she has lived in the United States for more than a year without papers, as some eleven million people have, a law in place since the nineteen-­nineties bars her from reëntering the country for up to a decade. That could mean, in effect, getting stranded outside the U.S., despite having a partner, possibly children, and a livelihood here. She can get a waiver permitting her to remain in the U.S. if she can prove that her prolonged absence would cause “extreme hardship” for certain members of her family. But, because of processing delays, getting the waiver can now take three and a half years.

A couple of weeks ago, at the White House, President Joe Biden announced the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. He gave roughly half a million undocumented spouses of citizens a path to permanent legal status, on the condition that they have lived here since at least 2014 and pass a criminal-­background check. “I refuse to believe that to secure our border we have to walk away from being American,” Biden said. “The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history.”

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