More Than A Magazine, A Movement
More than 10 million people are stateless around the globe, with no “home” country to call their own—and women and children are most likely to fall outside citizenship laws.
For stateless women, their very existence—and the right to live a life as a full citizen of a country—has been blotted out by geopolitics and sexism.
Like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration is prioritizing the appearance of border control over saving people’s lives.
At the U.S. border with Mexico, under the notorious Title 42 policy, the pandemic is still routinely invoked to justify expelling immigrants seeking asylum without any semblance of review or due process.
Many criticize the Title 42 order as unnecessary, overreaching and cruel. Nonetheless, the policy has resulted in over 2.4 million expulsions to date—and counting.
Hostile state or federal laws that ban or restrict abortion and criminalize pregnancy outcomes could have yet another devastating impact: threatening eligibility for legal immigration status and undermining efforts to create more equitable and humane immigration laws.
The politics of immigration and the politics of choice will continue to collide as extreme lawmakers cynically trade the reproductive health of immigrant and non-citizen women for political gain.
Keeping a public health order that was legally suspect in force because it gave DHS free rein to expel is not a solution to border control. There are many steps the administration can take to begin to erase the legacy of Title 42, like implementing reforms and improvements.
This holiday could give us a chance to start over with a national conversation on immigration that is unifying, rather than polarizing.
Such a conversation starts with identifying shared values and employing active listening. This is also an opportunity to bring our values as feminists to the table.
With humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Haiti and at the border, the U.S. must reassess what kind of lasting policy changes would prepare us to protect refugees and other vulnerable people in need around the world.
There must be more measures that allow for temporary and permanent protection within the country, more deliberate and sustained efforts to promote good government and economic opportunity internationally and a commitment to address the regional ebb and flow of migration to the U.S.
The Senate has just passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution designed to bring to fruition many of President Biden’s campaign promises to improve the lives of families and children, including a $105 billion allocation of funds to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
The next steps are fraught with difficulty, but still, this is an incredibly important first step towards offering almost 11 million people—47 percent of whom are women—a chance at legal status and ultimately, citizenship.
Currently, 26.3 million refugees are hoping to be resettled. Raising the cap sends a signal the U.S. recognizes the depth of need and encourages other countries to do the same—something President Biden acknowledged back on Day 16.
To refuse to increase the number now, but instead release new targets incrementally, will make it more difficult for refugees, resettlement agencies and communities to plan and prepare for refugee arrivals.
Protecting asylum seekers is a woman’s issue of the first order.
Asylum seekers in and of themselves are not a “crisis” for the U.S., nor is an increase in the flow of undocumented immigrants generally—as long as the resources are made available to humanely manage the flow of people.
