FULL TRANSCRIPT
[The following is the full transcript of the blog video: How Will Coronavirus Change Immigration?]
Hi there. This is Erick Widman from Passage Immigration Law. I’m an Immigration Lawyer based in Portland, Oregon in the US, and I wanted to share with you three thoughts on the ways that this Coronavirus is likely going to change immigration within the US and also around the world. first idea is that USC is the agency that processes all the immigration requests for benefits here, is going to, out of necessity, become more tech savvy and moving to the cloud. And we’ll have more electronic filings than we did before. This is going to be good for the environment. And it’s been an effort that the US government has had for years now. But they’re going to accelerate that it’s going to make the system more efficient overall, they’re going to work out the kinks faster, out of necessity to get the system figured out. Secondly, the Coronavirus also is going to make the US and the entire world rethink healthcare. President Trump has imposed a health care requirement upon immigrants. But globally, we’re going to have to think of ways to prevent this type of outbreak from happening again. And that is going to be by looking at health care as something that’s essential to our international national security, and almost like a human right, it will be something that’s so important that we take care of each other with that we’re going to put the resources into it, it’s going to be crucial to do that, and allow people get care like many Western European countries are doing in Canada, that they can get care so that not only is that individual benefit, but we’re all benefited. So we also have to deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants who are scared to get care. So we, out of necessity also need to figure that out, instead of scaring people into not going and getting preventative health care ahead of time, we need to look at a more proactive, realistic and humane solution there. Finally, the entire world is going to want to think more internationally, as our law firm likes to say, to live globally, think and live globally. Because if you retreat in theory into your own nation state, in the hopes that you’re going to be safer, you are actually diluted that’s not going to help the world be safer or more prosperous. We’re way too interconnected. And it’s in our best interest to recognize that every single country has strengths and weaknesses. We all have our comparative advantage. And we need to learn from each other, and also pull the best talent from every country, to put them on teams that are going to solve big important problems. We need the best scientists fighting against this virus. And we have companies in scientists and researchers in Germany and Switzerland who are already making headway against this virus, we in the US need to benefit from that. Asia has done an amazing job at containing this and fighting it better than than we have here. So we have to think globally, we have to recognize that we’re all better off and that we can achieve our full potential as an entire world by pulling from a global talent pool.
