WASHINGTON, DC — FWD.us President Todd Schulte issued the following statement on the Biden Administration’s expansion of the Central American Minors (CAM) program:

“Expanding the CAM program to create more legal pathways for people to apply to come to the U.S. is smart policy and a critical step in the right direction. It will allow children who would have previously been forced to walk thousands of miles to access protection at the border, to apply from closer to their homes. We must strengthen and improve our asylum system at the border, including ending the use of Title 42, but expanding legal immigration pathways is a vital component of the Administration’s effort to build a working, humane approach to regional migration and asylum. We encourage the Administration to swiftly implement the application process for this program and ensure that the potentially 100,000 plus people who are now eligible can reunify with family and access vital humanitarian protections as quickly as possible.”

Background

Earlier this month, FWD.us issued a new video outlining the steps the Biden Administration should take to build a working, humane approach to regional migration, to protect asylum, and to keep families together. This video highlights:

• How the broken immigration system was gutted, essentially eliminating the asylum system, employment-based immigration system, including temporary work visas, and the family-based immigration system, leaving families with little to no opportunity to apply to come to the U.S. from closer to home.
• The need to strengthen the asylum process to ensure we can protect people in desperate need. The current journey migrants experience to arrive at our southern border cannot be the only option for people looking to apply to come to the U.S. from across the Western Hemisphere, and those who are transiting through.
• The need to create more opportunities for people to apply to come to the US through other avenues and from closer to their homes instead of forcing them into dangerous travel routes to the border, or weaponizing cruelty to deter these vulnerable populations from ever reaching our borders when seeking humanitarian protection, economic opportunity, or trying to unify with their families.

Ensuring that we create more legal avenues for people to immigrate to the U.S. will provide a vital source of future immigrants, keep our families and communities together, and grow our economy even stronger. America must work to welcome families and children seeking asylum with dignity, while expanding legal avenues to our immigration system.

We must only look to recent history to see that a strategy built solely on deterrence is both wrong and does not actually reduce forced migration. We must work to improve conditions on the ground that reduce the need for forced migration while creating working, humane legal immigration avenues that alongside a humane asylum system can be an effective, orderly and humane approach to regional migration. The administration put forth a series of positive plans, and they must follow through on them, including ending the use of Title 42 at the border.

The strategy outlined in this video won’t fix everything—not close—but we hope they can provide the outline to a better path forward after years of failed policies of deterrence.