This week’s episode ofLast Week Tonight with John Oliverangled towards holding PresidentJoe Bidenaccountable for promises he made before getting elected. One of those promises involves the future and well-being of a huge slate of people who currently are sitting at the U.S. borders waiting for the government to make a decision about them. The immigration problem is an old topic that often resurfaces, andJohn Oliverbrought it back to show why.
The show’s main segment made the point that Asylum Seekers have no reason to celebrate the change of administration in the U.S. government, since Biden’s approach toimmigrant policyis not exactly an improvement over Donald Trump’s. The episode showed how people at the border – especially the ones from Central and South America – are treated with disregard and forced to jump through a series of hoops that often leads them nowhere near getting some form of legal registration to enter the country.
Last Week TonightShows the Damage Caused By Title 42
Last Week Tonightalso made it clear that you can’t talk about immigration without mentioning Title 42, an amendment which, in theory, was put together to protect bothimmigrantsand Americans during the pandemic. Title 42 allowed border officers to send immigrants away by suggesting they could be a health risk. The episode showed that, as you could imagine, Title 42 was and continues to be used as a form to randomly sending Asylum Seekers away without ever giving them a specific reason why they were getting sent back. And some of them are blindsided and only discover they were rejected when they are inside a bus that’s moving in the opposite direction that they want to go.
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Oliver then reminds viewers that Biden’s campaign was built upon the promise of making it easier for families to enter American soil and start anew lifein the country, but that is hardly what’s been happening. And Biden’s administration seems to be doing only the bare minimum to help: The creation of asmartphoneapp called “CBP One,” which was supposed to speed up the immigration process, has mostly generated frustration among foreigners. The app has several glitches, can’t seem to run a face recognition for people with darker skin (yes), and its lackluster performance has led people to dub it “Asylum Ticketmaster.”
Last Week Tonightalso showcased the difference in treatment that people from South and Central America get when compared toUkrainerefugees, for example. At this point, it’s pretty much a given to say that white skin makes life easier for a lot of people, and the immigration situation at the borders is only one more example of that. It’s pretty ironic that the U.S. government would treatLatinx immigrantswith that much disregard while having no problem letting undocumented workers pass the border if that means Americans will still get crops delivered to them,as this episode revealed.
