President Joe Biden announced a new program on Thursday to help immigration advocates and corporate donors import tens of thousands of Ukrainian workers and consumers from safe European countries.
The migrants will be brought into the United States via the “parole” side door in the border that was created to help individual foreigners in emergencies.
“They don’t have the [legal] power to do it,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.
The parole side-door was created by Congress for rare and small-scale emergencies, such as when a foreign ship needs to transfer a sick crewmember to a U.S. hospital, “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
But Biden will likely get away with the plan unless a state Attorney General takes him to court, he added. “The biggest [political] issue is that [the Ukrainians] a sympathetic group of people … consequently, nobody’s actually going to challenge this in federal court. So the Biden administration is going to be allowed to go ahead and do what it wants.”
Biden’s Ukraine immigration program does not increase the safety of Ukrainians, he noted, because they would otherwise be able to settle in Europe. “There’s no reason to do this … The EU [European Union] has already said that the [Ukrainian refugees] can remain in the EU for up to three years,” Arthur said, adding:
I’m sympathetic, which is why I wholly support what the EU is doing to protect those people. And if the United States wants to do the most that we can for the largest number of people, [we should help the] bear the burden of the good work that they’re doing. For the money that we’re going to be spending to bring 100,000 [Ukrainians] to the United States, we could probably take care of half a million in Ukraine or in Europe.
Bringing the Ukrainians to the U.S. is also bad for Ukraine, he said:
We all hope the…