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Biden's bold immigration plan would really put America first - By the WaPo Editorial Board
Opinion by Editorial Board
Jan. 21, 2021 at 1:57 p.m. EST
President Joe Biden has served notice that his ambitious immigration plan is in his first rank of his priorities. Some of his program will be immediately implementable; some may get bogged down in Congress, where many Republicans will regard it as an occasion to brandish the word "amnesty," red meat for their bases. No matter. Biden's plan is in keeping with the United States' best traditions. It responds to the challenge of population stagnation. It would reverse his predecessor's extravagantly cruel policies. And it is now clear that when it comes to immigration, Biden is all in.
That courageous stance was not necessarily expected or politically expedient. Unity was the new president's campaign theme and inaugural touchstone, yet few issues are as divisive as immigration. His evident readiness to tap his modest reserves of political capital for a slugfest on immigration is a signal that the United States has returned to its roots as a beacon for refugees and a humanitarian role model among nations.
The plan is also smart. The U.S. population growth rate in the just-ended decade was the lowest since the first national census in 1790, according to the Brookings Institution - lower even than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The number of Americans below the age of 18 actually shrank in the 2010s, by more than 1 million.
That stagnation, the product of an aging population and historically low fertility rates, cannot be reversed by immigration alone. But it will certainly be exacerbated, and has been in the past four years, by a policy hostile to newcomers. In Donald Trump's penultimate year in office, annual net immigration fell below 600,000, the lowest level in decades; it was more than 1 million in the final years of the Obama presidency.
more/no paywall
https://dailyprogress.com/washingtonpost/commentary/bidens-bold-immigration-plan-would-really-put-america-first/article_2e8eabc3-d69e-5005-a34d-0f97f4f07ad0.html