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United States President Donald Trump said he would suspend immigration for green card applicants for 60 days, arguing that the controversial measure would protect jobs in the United States.
Trump offered the first details on a vague announcement Monday night, addressing a key issue for his conservative base as the country is devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 43,000 people dead in the U.S. USA
“By pausing immigration, it will help put unemployed Americans on the front line of work as the United States reopens,” Trump said in his daily pandemic.
“This pause will last for 60 days,” he said, adding that he would decide on any extension or change “depending on the economic conditions at the time.”
The Republican president said the order “would only apply to people seeking permanent residence, in other words, those who receive green cards.”
“It will not apply to those who enter temporarily,” he added.
According to US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Wall Street Journal before Trump spoke, the eventual executive order could include exceptions for farm and health care workers.
The United States government issued 462,000 visas in fiscal year 2019, according to official data, a significant drop from the 617,000 visas granted in 2016 under Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
Any executive order on immigration is likely to provoke legal action to reverse it, and has already sparked anger among Trump’s Democratic opponents.
Elsewhere, yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pressured Trump to get more help from the federal government to conduct coronavirus tests.
It came during a face-to-face meeting that he described as cordial and productive after weeks of sometimes unpleasant exchanges.
Widespread testing is seen as key for states to lift orders to stay home and reopen their closed economies.
Cuomo said his state, the one most affected in the United States by the pandemic, wants to quickly double its daily test rate.
He said he lobbied Trump for the federal government to take control of the reagent supply chain and other medical equipment to carry out the tests.
The objective is to prevent states from competing with each other on the open market to acquire the material, as they have been doing, or to look abroad to buy it.
Speaking after his first personal meeting with Trump since the health crisis began, Cuomo acknowledged that the tests themselves are the responsibility of individual states.
“But we need help from the federal government to make the supply chain work for manufacturers, on reagents, test kits, etc., and we said we would like to work together in New York State to take our current test rate. – we do approximately 20,000 tests a day on average – and double that. Go to 40,000.
“It is a very aggressive goal, and we said we would work together to achieve that goal, so it was a very good conversation,” Cuomo said.
The Trump administration is eager to get Americans back to work, and has said there is enough evidence for each state to go into “phase one” of a gradual reopening, ending some restrictions on staying home.
But several US governors have complained about the lack of testing capacity that would allow them to start reopening their states safely without causing an increase in infections.
Health experts say the paucity of evidence means the United States may be underestimating the extent of the virus outbreak.
New York State is the epicenter of the United States coronavirus epidemic, accounting for about a third of the country’s deaths.
Meanwhile, one of the top US health officials. USA He warned that a second wave of coronavirus in the US USA It could be even more destructive because it will likely collide with the start of the flu season.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asked Americans to use the coming months to prepare for and get a flu shot.
“There is a possibility that the assault of the virus in our nation next winter is actually even more difficult than the one we just went through,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post.
“We are going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.
The United States has recorded more than 800,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.
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