U.S. Immigration Will Endure After Biden

With the U.S. elections now cemented in history, many are probably wondering what lies ahead for U.S. immigration policy.

Well …

Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the election, there is at least one good take away that we haven’t experienced since 1893 – a gap in time between a president’s two terms in office. The only president to have left the White House and return for a second term four years later was Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897).

Why is this a good thing you ask?

If the past is any predictor of future behavior, then, we can look at the Trump years from 2017 to 2020 to have a better sense of what U.S. immigration will look like in the next four years versus a president who has never previously held office. We do know that Trump didn’t declare civil law suspended and completely dismantled the entire immigration system as we know it, so we can expect the framework of U.S. immigration to remain largely intact.

That is, we anticipate the law for employment, investment, and family-based immigration requirements to go unchanged.

Canadian and Mexican professionals rendering services to U.S companies in connection with prearranged services will still be able to apply for a TN visa or status; managers, executives, and people with specialized knowledge who have been working for a company abroad for at least one (1) year can still be transferred to the U.S. company (L-1s); and U.S. companies will go on to hire foreign works for their speciality occupations positions (H-1Bs).

The United States has never been a country to shy away from foreign trade and investment with the potential to create jobs for their citizens (E-1/E-2 treaty trader and investor visas). So why would it now?

Despite all the tough talk about immigration, family unity is still the hallmark of the U.S. immigration system (spousal, parental, and child sponsorships and K-1 fiancée visas).

And people inadmissible to the U.S. will overcome those complexities through waiver applications and be lawfully admitted to the U.S.

Unless there’s an act of congress, what we do expect to see is constant change. Change in how cases are processed, so there will likely be increased scrutiny of cases, more requests for evidence, longer processing times, perhaps even more interviews where they were previously waived to name a few.

But …

That’s why there are practitioners like me who, during the first Trump administration, stayed on top of the constant change day-in and day-out and overcame these obstacles, guiding clients as they navigated their immigration journey into the U.S., and I will do it again!