If elected, on day 1 of being president, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the November US elections, would send an immigration reforms bill to provide a road map for citizenship for 11 billion undocumented immigrants. The former vice-president of the US said this in an interview to the NBC News, on a question concerning the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) and immigration.
“I am going to send in a legislative for immigration reforms bill to the Congress to provide a road map for citizenship for 11 billion undocumented immigrants who contribute so much to this country, including the 1.7 million AAPI. My immigration policy is built around keeping families together,” he said.
In its plan for the naturalisation process for green card holders, the Biden administration promises to make things easier. Naturalisation - the legal process to become a US citizen - will be streamlined and made more accessible to qualified green card holders. The Biden policy says: "Biden will restore faith in the citizenship process by removing roadblocks to naturalisation and obtaining the right to vote, addressing the application backlog by prioritizing the adjudication workstream and ensuring applications are processed quickly, and rejecting the imposition of unreasonable fees."
At an earlier speech in the Culinary Union town hall in Las Vegas last year, Biden said that he would not limit the number of family numbers that could accompany a green card holder to the United States. "There is no reason why someone here on a green card should have to choose whether his or her husband or wife and children come along or bring back to the United States grandfather or mother. That's going to end," he said.
This is reiterated in the policy released by Biden team. "Biden will support family-based immigration by preserving family unification as a foundation of our immigration system," and goes on to add that it will support "legislation that treats the spouse and children of green card holders as the immediate relatives they are, exempting them from caps, and allowing parents to bring their minor children with them at the time they immigrate."
They’d eliminate ‘the limits on employment-based green cards by country, which have kept so many Indian families in waiting for too long’.
The policy is also in favour of green cards for doctoral students. It says that ‘foreign graduates of a U.S. doctoral program should be given a green card with their degree and that losing these highly trained workers to foreign economies is a disservice to our own economic competitiveness’.