José López Zamorano
La Red Hispana
From the nation’s highest platform, in his State of the Union Address (SOTU), President Joe Biden made it clear to Republicans that scapegoating the most vulnerable migrants will not solve the immigration crisis facing the United States.
“I am not going to demonize immigrants by saying that they ‘poison the blood of our country.’ I’m not going to separate families. “I will not expel people from the United States for their faith,” Biden exclaimed before an auditorium full of Republicans, some of whom booed him.
But Democrats and a part of the public applauded him, among them were a handful of Dreamers, who attended with special guests from California legislators, Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Lou Correa.
The scene illustrates the level of polarization that exists in the United States on the electoral issue in the final stretch towards the presidential elections on November 5.
The Republicans, who have followed Donald Trump’s orders not to give Biden a victory in an election year, insist on toughening immigration policy with the harshest measures of the Trump era: separating families, restrictions on asylum, humanitarian parole and completing the wall.
For this reason, they blocked the Senate’s bipartisan immigration agreement that included, as Biden reminded them, sufficient resources to hire 4,300 agents to process asylum cases, 1,500 border agents and more than 100 immigration judges to accelerate the resolution of the 2 million case backlog within 6 months.
On the other hand, in the purest propaganda style, the right seeks to exploit the terrible murder of the young Laken Riley, where the main suspect is an undocumented Venezuelan, to imply that undocumented immigrants bring criminality under their arm to the streets of the United States.
Biden was forced to deviate from his speech to respond to Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor-Green who asked him to talk about the case of the young Riley, and reminded her that in fact that an undocumented person could have caused death, but that many more crimes are committed by legal persons in the United States. The statistics support the president.
A few days after his address to the nation, President Biden sent Congress an ambitious fiscal year 2025 budget request that includes nearly $26 billion to deal with the migration problem and the fentanyl crisis facing the United States.
If Democrats and Republicans have not been able to agree on last year’s 2024 budget, it is not necessary to have a crystal ball to know what is going to happen with the White House budget request.
What can make the difference? The answer is clear: a change in political arithmetic following the November 5 elections, where Congress and the White House are renewed. And for that, your vote counts, because every voice matters.
