Every year when we say goodbye to the past year and welcome the New Year with excitement and celebrations. A new year comes with new hopes, resolutions, planning, and much more. Like every year, 2020 was also considered to be the year when people will bring certain changes in their lifestyle when people will get more consistent toward their goals when people thought of going on a world tour and many more plans like these. But all of a sudden we got to know that water has been spilled on all our plans and we are left with no hope of seeing anything better coming.
I am talking about the pandemic that is covid-19 that came like an unwanted guest and many countries are still struggling with it. The USA is a country that reported the highest number of coronavirus cases. Despite being a superpower, its economy couldn’t handle the pandemic effects. Travelling stopped, many businesses shut down, many people faced many mental health problems and much worse things a nation faced as a whole. Immigration is also a part of the things that has been affected at a very high amount of rate. We are here to tell you about the effects on immigration of covid-19 in the USA.
Routine Visa Services suspended:
Routine visa service is when a daily number of people get a visa to enter a foreign country. Traveling is the first thing that has been banned in this pandemic that also means that you won’t be able to get a visa to travel to any country. Like this only USA suspended its routine visa services. This suspension includes both the immigrant and non-immigrant visa appointments. A person who’s either a student or a visitor, who either has a payment based visa or a family-based visa each one of them was restricted to enter the country. Visas are only given in emergency cases. Few were lifted in July.
Delay in becoming U.S citizens:
Just think for a second that you have been trying for many years to become a lawful permanent resident of the USA and you are on a final step to finally have a U.S citizenship and all of a sudden a pandemic strikes and creates an extreme delay in this process. This is happening in the USA. Asylum and immigrant applications are put on a hold and interviews for it are also stopped for a few months. Many oath ceremonies have either delayed or shifted to video or drive through oath ceremonies. Delay in becoming a U.S citizen has left many people in a hopeless state.
Individuals expelled at U.S land borders:
Many people enter the U.S through its borders. The country USA has one of its borders with Mexico. People entering the USA through this border need to have a valid passport with them. Covid-19 has affected the entry through the border in a very worse manner. The United States border patrol was ordered to expel the individuals entering through the border and more than 100,000 people were expelled without even being allowed to seek asylum. This number was confirmed at an immigrant podcast available on the internet. Many people were stranded in Mexico. This left people in a miserable state of either going back home or remaining stranded.
Non-detained hearings postponed:
A term called master calendar hearing is used for any court hearing that is related to immigration. An MCH (master calendar hearing) takes place in an immigration court. The person finds a lawyer first for this hearing. An immigration court decides whether non-citizens are allowed to live in the U.S or not. Decisions like deportation, asylum entitlement, or relief are taken here. Covid-19 has led to non-detention court hearings being postponed. While for the detained immigrants and children the hearings are still carried on. But as a whole covid-19 has affected the immigration court system as many courts that were opened in the pandemic also have been shut down leading to many hearings being delayed.
Many immigrants are being missed out on:
When covid-19 hit the USA many things worse impacts were seen especially the impact of covid-19 on people’s financial status. A person earning a handsome amount is seen being bankrupt in just a few weeks because of the shutdown of his business. Certain measures were taken to help the people in this pandemic facing recession. The financial support that was given by the government didn’t include many immigrants or say, non-citizens. These people were found to be ineligible for emergency grants and financial aid despite being a lawful non-citizen.
These were the major impacts that covid-19 had on the immigration system of the USA. The people affected the most in this pandemic are the immigrants. These people are in a miserable state either because of the financial difficulties or because of waiting for many days for their turn for a court hearing. Many suggestions and pieces of advice are given to the Government of the USA to take out some solutions for these problems. Nobody knows when covid-19 will be over but everyone is hoping to come out of this pandemic very soon.
