New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez this week unveiled a new plan to overhaul immigration and border security. In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, Menendez (D-NJ) described his plan as an attempt to get the Biden administration “to move in a better, more effective, more humane way and to preserve our nation’s history as a nation in which asylum is the law.”
The plan, which the senator has shared with the White House has, he said, four pillars: “creating new legal pathways and extending existing pathways to reduce pressure at the southern border, to include increased resources at the border to process asylum seekers and remove people without legal claims to stay in the United States, to expand humanitarian assistance and develop financing to better integrate refugees and migrants in countries across the Americas … And lastly, it’s to elevate our efforts to counter transnational criminal organizations that are involved in human smuggling and trafficking. ”
Migration is a hemispheric challenge, said Menendez. “We need to work with the other countries in the hemisphere to be part of meeting that challenge … All of these actions can largely be taken place by the administration through executive functions.”
