Biden Opens a New Back Door on Immigration

Employers in Illinois are also gearing up for new arrivals. “This is a breath of fresh air, when we are seeing such a labor shortage,” said Sam Toia, president of the Illinois Restaurant Association in Chicago, who said businesses there were attracting many Ukrainians on parole because of the state’s historical ties to Ukraine.

Many of the new immigrants already have found work. Anastasiia Derezenko of Ukraine crossed the southern border with her husband and two children last year, and the family received the temporary protected status Mr. Biden approved for Ukrainians. She found a job as a certified nurse assistant in Washington State.

“We have decided we don’t want to go back; we want to build our life here,” she said.

Humanitarian parole has been used in the past. The authority granted by Congress to the executive branch in 1952 in fact has evolved into a key tool for expeditiously admitting people who do not qualify under established immigration categories, though rarely to the degree seen lately under the Biden administration.

President Eisenhower used parole authority to allow 15,000 refugees to enter the United States after the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Before the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, parole was used to swiftly admit 690,000 Cubans and 360,000 refugees from Southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon.

Over the last several administrations, some of the most consequential immigration policies have resulted from presidents exercising discretion, including former President Barack Obama’s executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which gave young undocumented immigrants work permits and a reprieve from deportation. Mr. Trump used his authority to ban travel into the United States from a list of targeted countries.

But following the earlier moves to parole Cubans and Southeast Asians, Congress quickly granted the ability for them to obtain permanent U.S. residency.

The Biden administration paroled into the United States some 75,000 Afghans evacuees amid the hectic U.S. military withdrawal, but a divided Congress does not appear likely to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that would put them on the path to green cards. If it fails to pass, the administration would have to extend their temporary status before it expires in August.