First, President-elect Biden has already said he will issue immigration related executive orders including reinstating DACA as soon as his inauguration on January 20, 2021. If not, he indicated he would do so by April 30, 2021. He said he would halt deportations during his first 100 days in office. Doing so will send a message that America is still a fair and welcoming nation.
Biden and his science-based Coronavirus task force will no longer scapegoat immigrants and will discontinue the use of the terms “Wuhan Flu” and “Chinese flu”. Biden likely will change protections in detention facilities that have seen an enormous number of cases which put attorneys, healthcare workers, guards and of course detainees at high risk for infection.
Because detention is a profitable business, however, it will be an uphill battle to reform immigration detention, especially in S. Georgia where a whistleblower nurse claimed female detainees were being given unnecessary hysterectomies then deported.
Next, it is likely that President Biden will go back to allowing USCIS and our consulates abroad to grant employment based and family based petitions rather than enforce anti-immigrant policies like rejecting cases for nonsensical reasons such as leaving blanks on forms where there was no answer. (For example, if you did not write “none” in each blank about how many children you had if you did not have any, a case could be rejected under Trump.)
There is hope that Biden will do away with some of the new, unnecessary policies that have hurt American businesses such as the H-1B registration program likely will be done away with along with interviews for pre-approved employment based cases. (The interviews have made cases take much longer and have not proven to weed out fraud or terrorism.) The ridiculous form I-944 regarding public charge will also likely evaporate on January 20th. Hopefully the time saved not doing these nonsensical activities will make for faster processing at USCIS so people can work legally and pay taxes.
There has been talk for years about an entrepreneur visa. There is cautious optimism that Biden will do away with the absurd Buy American, Hire American executive order and that Congress will approve a new visa for start-ups to attract foreign talent and hire American workers.
Lastly, since Trump silenced immigration judges and basically did away with their unions, #46 should increase judicial independence, fairness, and consistency in decision making rather than rubber stamping “denied” on court documents.
On the other hand, while major changes in asylum law are not foreseen, it is predicted that asylum cases will be treated more fairly and that migrant processing at the border will once again be orderly. For example, there has been talk about Biden establishing an Office of Migrant Protection to coordinate with other agencies the rapid scale-up of screening and protection capacity. The office, although needed, will not likely come to fruition in Biden’s first two years in office.