Activists push to obtain work authorizations for undocumented immigrants

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Confronted with an influx of migrants making their way to Chicago, New York and other big cities, Mr. Biden has used executive power to allow several hundred thousand of them to live and work temporarily in the United States in an effort to make them less reliant on shelters and other assistance.

Now groups representing undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-citizen children — as well as their employers — are urging the president to deploy the same broad power to open channels for the more than eight million living in the United States who are barred from legal employment.

“If President Biden can grant work permits to new arrivals, he can do it for people picking our crops, emptying bedpans and cleaning hotel rooms for more than 10 years,” said Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, whose 1,400 Members include business associations and company executives.
Business leaders have lobbied Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill for decades to overhaul the broken immigration system and address their labor needs. But the calls have gone nowhere in an increasingly polarized Congress.

The business coalition, in a letter to the president signed by more than 300 employers and trade associations, urged “immediate action” to extend work authorization to long-term undocumented people. In particular, Ms. Shi said, the president should prioritize work permits for those without legal status: more than one million undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, 800,000 parents of U.S.-citizen children and 300,000 farm workers.

About three quarters of the 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States as of 2021 were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank. Roughly two million people out of the overall undocumented population have a temporary legal status that makes them eligible to work.

But a sweeping action by the president to allow millions more to work legally could prompt court challenges and political attacks from critics, even as some of those same critics have stymied or undermined the administration’s efforts.