Joe Biden has made more use of immigration “parole” than any American president to bypass an uncooperative Congress, but he’s hardly the first.
The presidential power has been a centerpiece of Biden’s strategy to channel immigrants through new and expanded legal pathways and discourage illegal crossings, a radical difference from his rival Donald Trump.
Biden granted at least 1 million temporary visits, which generally include eligibility to work. Trump has said during his campaign to return to the White House that he would end the “outrageous abuse of parole.”
Parole, which was created under a 1952 law, allows the president to admit people “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” It has been ordered 126 times by every president since then except for Trump, according to David Bier of the pro-immigration Cato Institute.
media spoke with immigrants who arrived during four major parole waves over the past 72 years.
Edith Lauer was a 14-year-old student when she left Budapest with her parents and older sister Nora in November 1956. Her parents felt unsafe after Soviet tanks invaded, crushing a short-lived revolt against the Moscow-controlled government. Many fled, including about 32,000 who were paroled in the United States.
“They knew that if they waited around, they would be arrested, (possibly) tried in a communist trial … and or executed,” Lauer, 81, recalled from her home in Cleveland.
The four went to a military base in Munich, where they stayed for weeks until her mother’s cousin sponsored them and offered his house in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Edith Lauer arrived by military plane at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, a former army camp converted to Hungarian refugee housing.
“My God, this is freedom, democracy, it was just a totally different world,” she remembers thinking. “I recognize that very, very soon, and … everybody was so welcoming and so wonderful.”
Her father, a lawyer and the only one in the family who spoke English, became a librarian at the Library of Congress. Her mother started as a dishwasher and went on to work at a laboratory producing serum from monkeys.
In 1963, Lauer married an American student she met at the University of Maryland who later became a corporate executive. She graduated from Texas A&M University and became a teacher. She has two daughters and two grandchildren, and founded a nonprofit organization to promote understanding of her people.
The Vietnam War era produced an exodus from Southeast Asia that brought parole to about 340,000 people.
Kim-Trang Dang was a 25-year-old law student working as teacher when she left Saigon with her then-husband, two siblings and five other family members. Her father and two sisters had left days earlier. It was April 1975, just before the capital of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese communist forces.
They drove a half-hour in the middle of the night to a river port where a boat was waiting. There were bombs, and fire in the streets, but they were told a U.S. military ship was going to pick them up at sea.
They went to Subic Bay, the Philippines, and then Guam, before being transferred to a camp at Fort Chaffee, a military installation in western Arkansas where they stayed for about a month waiting for a sponsor who could take them out to live in the U.S.
The sponsor offered them his house in Tampa, Florida. Kim-Trang got a job at a shrimp factory, where she spent eight hours a day pulling off shrimp skin and had English classes at night. She moved to San Diego in the 1980s and got a job as a social worker at a Catholic organization, where she retired after 23 years.
Kim-Trang, 73, has three U.S.-born children and five grandchildren.
“I’m happy that I have a freedom here, and I don’t live under the communism,” she said. “When I met them, the Americans were really nice … They opened their arms to us. If they don’t open their arms, we don’t know where to go.”
She had her own business taking care of the elderly. Now, she volunteers as president of a Vietnamese service organization. She became a U.S. citizen in 1980.
United Arab Emirates Dirham Exchange Rate
