Trump immigration order criticized

US President Donald Trump's decision to suspend immigration to the United States for 60 days to stop those applying for permanent residency from taking US jobs has drawn criticism from immigration advocates who brand it a "distraction" amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump said he signed the executive order on Wednesday. "This would ensure that unemployed Americans of all backgrounds will be first in line for jobs as our economy opens,"Trump said at a news briefing.

The president had initially wanted to suspend all immigration to the US to stop the spread of COVID-19 and "protect American jobs", as 22 million have filed for unemployment. But on Tuesday he said his executive order would affect only some family members of US citizens seeking green cards (permanent residency IDs) and foreign workers who want to move to the US.

"It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad," Trump said at the briefing.

The executive order won't bar immigrants already living in the US from seeking green cards or the 85,000 workers a year given H-1B visas, nor seasonal farm workers. It also will not stop people using temporary visas for work or travel.

"The Trump administration is again seeking to distract Americans from their own failures to secure testing, provide basic protections for all workers, and create a healthcare system that works for us all,"Bitta Mostofi, commissioner of the New York Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, told China Daily.

"Among the 1 million essential workers in New York City working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic－delivery workers, EMS staff, drivers, healthcare personnel, and more－half are immigrants."

Former US secretary of state John Kerry told CNN that the immigration order was "a sideshow, an effort to divert attention".

The president's initial announcement caught some senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security off guard on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported.

Political base

Trump has often used immigration as an issue to appeal to his political base. He pledged to build a wall along the Mexican border and enforced a travel ban from a number of Muslim-majority countries.

Amid COVID-19, he restricted travel from Europe and China. He also closed the border with Canada and Mexico.

Legal experts noted that if Trump had barred all immigration, he likely would have faced a court challenge.

"If the executive order (had) suspended all immigration to the US, it would surely be challenged as unconstitutional," Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School and an expert on immigration and asylum law in the US, told China Daily.

"Presidents have wide authority on immigration, but no president has suspended all immigration before. There would definitely be challenges to the executive order....It is one thing to require extra vetting to make sure foreign nationals entering the United States are healthy. It is another thing to ban all foreign nationals on the fallacious theory that they all have COVID-19."

Any order that affected current green-card holders "from returning to the United States would surely have been challenged as violating the due process rights of those individuals", Yale-Loehr said.

Ian Kysel, a visiting assistant clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and director of the International Migrants Bill of Rights Initiative, also believes Trump could not have banned all immigration to the US.

"Such an action would have (had) devastating consequences for families, universities, businesses and communities around the country," Kysel said.

"Even more than doubling down on an apparently xenophobic effort to dismantle the US immigration system, a blanket ban unmoored from public health imperatives violates basic international human rights law obligations."

The US State Department canceled immigrant and nonimmigrant visa appointments on March 18, halting the issuance of visas. Processing for refugee resettlement has also been paused.