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      AstraZeneca’s boss is a boardroom superstar but a potential £2m cherry is pushing the point

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      A majority is a majority, but a rebellion of 40% against an executive pay policy is too large to be pinned solely on those brain-dead fund managers who outsource their thinking to proxy voting agencies.At AstraZeneca some serious institutions, with Aviva Investors and Standard Life Aberdeen to the fore, clearly thought the company was pushing things too far by adding a potential £2m cherry on top of their chief executive, Pascal Soriot’s, already substantial pay package. The rebels had a point.Yes, Soriot is a boardroom superstar thanks to AstraZeneca’s success in supercharging the development and production of the Oxford University vaccine for no profit. Communication with regulators went awry at times, and Soriot himself obviously wasn’t getting his hands dirty in the labs. But the boss, even when operating from Australia, is doing an excellent job of standing up to irritating and ungrateful EU commissioners, which is also part of the pandemic operation. And, amid it all, the company didn’t miss a beat on its day job and had time to spend $39bn buying the rare disease specialist Alexion, which looks a promising deal.Yet exceptional effort in an exceptional year is roughly what one expects from a chief executive on Soriot’s pay package. In the last three years, his incentives have performed wonderfully and he has earned £13m, £15m and £15m, so is firmly established in the £1m-a-month category, which very few chief executives of FTSE 100 companies can say. Even for an international hero, it feels a decent whack.The company’s claim was that “the world drastically changed in the last 12 months, and so did AstraZeneca”, and thus adjustments should be made outside the normal three-yearly cycle for tweaking pay.That argument would have felt stronger if AstraZeneca was not already at the adventurous end by UK standards. Last year, Soriot earned 197 times the median pay among his workforce. And, critically, the new arrangement will take his variable pay – annual bonus plus long-term incentives – to 900% of his £1.33m salary. A few years ago 500% was regarded as high by FTSE 100 standards.That precedent-setting detail helps to explain why the rebellion was so strong. Those fund managers who care about controlling boardroom pay inflation saw the risk of knock-on effects elsewhere. Loyalty to Soriot probably swayed a few doubters and helped AstraZeneca prevail, but the company did not need to pick a fight at this time – it gave Soriot a chunky rise a year ago.Some real pay shockers (think Cineworld) have slipped through in recent months. If the wider message in the AstraZeneca vote is that fund managers are not all asleep, that would be no bad thing.Seatbelts on for more stock market turbulenceLast Friday investors preferred to see a silver lining in a weak set of US unemployment numbers – only 266,000 jobs created in the month of April, against forecasts of 1m. If a lack of new jobs implied no inflationary wage pressures in the US economy, at least the stock market could take a few days off from worrying about rises in interest rates, ran the theory.Inflationary pressures, though, come in many forms, and here is a piece of data that spooked the stock market on Tuesday: China’s producer prices index rose at an annual rate of 6.8% in April, up from 4.4% in March.That is the highest level for three years and a sign, probably, that the boom in prices of raw copper, iron ore and other raw materials is finally feeding through to goods. The FTSE 100 index fell 175 points, or 2.5%, following other stock markets down.The benign view says a flurry of higher prices is almost to be expected as the global economy reopens. In that case, central banks’ mistake would be to move too early and choke off recovery. Yet it is clearly also possible that we could be at the start of a big move on prices, with the next leg delivered by the Biden’s administration’s huge infrastructure programme. If so, the mistake would be to delay rate rises.Do not expect quick or clear answers. Inflation data can give mixed messages for months. Do, though, anticipate more bumpy days for stock markets. Investors’ default assumption is to assume the US Federal Reserve will play nicely and look through the short-term signals. Life could quickly get ugly if there is any deviation from that assumed path. More

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      Revealed: Biden administration holding tens of thousands of migrant children

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      The Biden administration is holding tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities that the Associated Press has learned spans two dozen states and includes five shelters with more than 1,000 children packed inside.Confidential data obtained by the AP shows the number of migrant children in government custody more than doubled in the past two months, and this week the federal government was housing around 21,000 kids, from toddlers to teens.A facility at Fort Bliss, a US army post in El Paso, Texas, had more than 4,500 children as of Monday. Attorneys, advocates and mental health experts say that while some shelters are safe and provide adequate care, others are endangering children’s health and safety.“It’s almost like ‘Groundhog Day’,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Luz Lopez, referring to the 1993 film in which events appear to be continually repeating. A US Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, Mark Weber, said the department’s staff and contractors were working hard to keep children in their custody safe and healthy.A few of the current practices are the same as those that Joe Biden and others criticized under the Trump administration, including not vetting some caregivers with full FBI fingerprint background checks. At the same time, court records show the Biden administration is working to settle several multimillion-dollar lawsuits that claim migrant children were abused in shelters under Donald Trump’s presidency.Part of the government’s plan to manage thousands of children crossing the US-Mexico border involves about a dozen unlicensed emergency facilities inside military installations, stadiums and convention centers that skirt state regulations and do not require traditional legal oversight.Inside the facilities, called emergency intake sites, children are not guaranteed access to education, recreational opportunities or legal counsel.In a recent news release, the administration touted its “restoration of a child centered focus for unaccompanied children”, and it has been sharing daily totals of the number of children in government custody as well as a few photos of the facilities. This reflects a higher level of transparency than the Trump administration. In addition, the amount of time children spend, on average, inside the system has dropped from four months last fall to less than a month this spring, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.Nonetheless, the agency has received reports of abuse that resulted in a handful of contract staffers being dismissed from working at the emergency sites this year, according to an official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.Attorneys say sometimes, even parents cannot figure out where their children are.Jose, a father who fled El Salvador after his village was targeted in a massacre, requested asylum in the US four years ago. He had hoped to welcome his wife and eight-year-old daughter to southern California this year, but the pair were turned around at the border in March and expelled to Mexico. The little girl crossed again by herself and was placed in the government shelter in Brownsville, Texas, on 6 April. Jose called a government hotline set up for parents seeking their migrant children repeatedly but said no one would tell him where she was.“I was so upset because I kept calling and calling and no one would tell me any information about where she was,” said Jose, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear of endangering his immigration case. For nearly three weeks, his daughter was held inside the Brownsville facility before finally being released to him in late April after an advocacy organization intervened to get the government to foot the bill for her airfare, as is required by the agency.HHS declined to say whether there are any legally enforceable standards for caring for children housed at the emergency sites or how they are being monitored. The Biden administration has allowed very limited access to news media once children are brought into facilities, citing the coronavirus pandemic and privacy restrictions.“HHS has worked as swiftly as possible to increase bed capacity and to ensure potential sponsors can provide a safe home while the child goes through their immigration proceedings,” HHS spokesman Weber said in a statement. Weber confirmed a number of specific shelter populations from the data the AP obtained.Of particular concern to advocates are mass shelters, with hundreds of beds apiece. These facilities can leave children isolated, less supervised and without basic services.The AP found about half of all migrant children detained in the US are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. More than 17,650 are in facilities with 100 or more children. Some shelters and foster programs are small, little more than a house with a handful of kids. A large Houston facility abruptly closed last month after it was revealed that children were being given plastic bags instead of access to restrooms.“The system has been very dysfunctional, and it’s getting worse,” said Amy Cohen, a child psychiatrist and executive director of the non-profit Every. Last. One., which works to help immigrant families fleeing violence in Central America. Although there have been large numbers of children arriving in the US for years, Cohen said she had never seen the situation as bad as it is today.Cohen described parents receiving calls from people refusing to identify themselves. They are told to be at an airport or bus station in the next two hours to pick up their children, who have been held for more than a month without notice, or they would not be released. Some parents are told to pay a travel agency thousands of dollars to have their child sent to them, she said.“The children are coming out sick, with Covid, infested with lice, and it will not surprise me to see children dying as a consequence, as we saw during the Trump years,” Cohen said. “The Biden administration is feverishly putting up these pop-up detention facilities, many of which have no experience working with children.”One reason so many children are now arriving without their parents dates back to a 2020 Trump administration emergency order that essentially closed the US-Mexico border to all migrants, citing public health concerns about spreading Covid-19.That emergency order still applies to adults, but the Biden administration has begun allowing children traveling without their parents to stay and seek asylum if they enter the country. As a result, some parents are sending their kids across the border by themselves.Most already have a parent or other adult relative or family friend, known as a sponsor, in the US waiting to receive them. But first they are typically detained by US Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, then turned over to a government shelter.Over the course of 2019, the federal government held nearly 70,000 children in a system of contracted shelters, mass detention camps and foster parents. This year those numbers are expected to be even higher.Some of the facilities holding children these days are run by contractors already facing lawsuits claiming that children were physically and sexually abused in their shelters under the Trump administration, while others are new companies with little or no experience working with migrant children. Collectively, the emergency facilities can accommodate nearly 18,000 children, according to data the agency provided earlier this month.“There are a lot of questions about are there standards and who is ensuring that they are meeting them, and what kind of transparency and accountability will there be,” said Jennifer Podkul, a vice-president at Kids in Need of Defense, which represents children in immigration court.Several organizations have filed legal claims against the federal government seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for parents who said their children were harmed while in government custody after being forcibly separated at the border under Trump administration policies. In some lawsuits, families claim children suffered physical and sexual abuse while in government custody, at both foster homes and private shelters.Biden’s justice department is defending the government against these claims, which were filed in 2019 under the Trump administration. But the federal response has been mixed since the change in leadership. Some cases continue to be argued, while others are in settlement discussions.In a recent filing in one case currently in litigation, federal attorneys agreed with the assertion that these policies indeed inflicted harm.As for the eight-year-old girl, her father, Jose, said she was adjusting to life in Los Angeles, enjoying playing with her older brother and, bit by bit, opening up.“She keeps asking me where her mom is, and I keep telling her not to worry, that she is in Mexico and she is OK,” he said. “Soon I hope she’ll tell me what it was like inside.” More

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      Biden picks ex-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel as US ambassador to Japan

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      Joe Biden has picked the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to be his ambassador to Japan.The selection ends months of speculation over whether Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, a former congressman and longtime Democratic operative, would be nominated to an administration role.In the first days of the Biden presidency Emanuel, 61, was mentioned as a possible secretary of transportation. Biden ended up picking Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran strongly in the Democratic presidential primary.Some progressives view Emanuel as a major antagonist within the party. He is often criticized among liberals, for example, for his handling of a shooting of an African American teenager during his time in Chicago.Emanuel served two terms as mayor but opted not to run a third time, in the face of a potentially brutal campaign.His selection as ambassador was first reported by the Financial Times. The Guardian confirmed it on Tuesday.The selection, which will be officially announced later this month, is one of a number of appointments Biden plans to make in full ambassadorial roles. There has been grumbling among Democratic donors that the president has not followed in a longstanding tradition of appointing major donors to plush diplomatic posts.Biden has reportedly eyed major American political figures for diplomatic jobs. In April, for example, Axios reported that he plans to pick Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Republican senator and presidential nominee John McCain, to be ambassador to the United Nations World Food Programme.Biden reportedly plans to nominate Ken Salazar, a former cabinet secretary and senator from Colorado, as ambassador to Mexico. More

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      US ‘turning the corner’ on pandemic but pressure grows to help other nations

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      The US is approaching a turning point where Covid vaccinations are sharply reducing infection and hospitalization rates, key figures in the fight against the disease said on Sunday, though the Biden administration is facing mounting pressure to do more to help other nations still in the grip of the disease.“We are turning the corner,” said Jeffrey Zients, the White House Covid response coordinator. With about 58% of adult Americans having received at least one shot of vaccine, and with some 113 million people now fully vaccinated, the country was on track to meet Joe Biden’s goal of 70% of the population at least partially vaccinated by 4 July, he said.“I think everyone is tired, and wearing a mask can be a pain. But we are getting there, and the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter,” Zients said, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show.Anthony Fauci struck a similar upbeat note on ABC News’s This Week. The nation’s top infectious diseases expert said it was time to start loosening guidelines and allowing Americans to start enjoying the benefits of vaccination.“Yes we do need to start being more liberal as we get more people vaccinated,” Fauci said. But he added that the battle was still on to get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated, because when that happened “the virus has nowhere else to go”.The daily load of new Covid cases has plummeted with the advent of vaccines in the US, from a seven-day average of more than 250,000 per day in January to the current average of about 43,000. Hospitalisations and deaths are also dramatically down.But as the US begins to feel the benefits of widespread vaccination, other parts of the world are still mired in the depths of the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has called the inequity in access to vaccines “grotesque” and a “moral outrage”.The WHO has pointed out that across the globe the past two weeks have seen more cases recorded than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, with India bearing the brunt. Daily cases are rising at alarming rates across south Asia, and observers are especially worried about Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.India continues to smash global records for new cases – more than 400,000 – and deaths (3,915). The country is grappling with dire shortages of oxygen and other essential hospital supplies.Last month Biden promised that the US would send oxygen-related supplies and vaccine materials to India. The US has also indicated it will provide up to 60m doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries struggling to protect their people from the virus, an act of altruism arguably diminished by the fact that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not approved for use in the US.In addition, the Biden administration has backed the campaign to waive patents on vaccines to allow low-income countries to make their own versions.Despite these recent concessions, Biden has come under intense pressure to do more to help ailing nations. In the early weeks of his presidency he refused to budge from the position that the US would only send vaccines abroad once all Americans had had the chance of being immunised.On Sunday, Fauci called on the manufacturers of vaccines in the US to scale up production “in a great way” to allow large quantities of supplies to reach India quickly. He said the ambition would be for “literally hundreds of millions of doses” destined for India and other needy countries.Asked whether waiving intellectual property rights on the patents would prevent the big US companies from making more vaccines for transport abroad, Fauci said “I don’t think that’s the case. They can scale up. I think the waiving of the patents is not going to necessarily interfere with that right now.”The contrast between countries in Africa where only 1% of the population is vaccinated and the US where almost 60% of adults have received at least one shot is all the more glaring given that at home in the US the emphasis now is not on accessing supplies of vaccines but on overcoming vaccine hesitancy. Several states are turning away allotted vaccines because demand is so low.Fauci said the group of those who were “recalcitrant” was relatively small. The Biden administration was seeking to overcome resistance among them by making vaccinations extremely easy to obtain, through walk-in pharmacies and mobile units, he said.The other method being pursued was to use “trusted messengers” – whether sports or entertainment stars, clergy or family doctors. They would spread the word that vaccines were a safe way of getting back to what Fauci described as “what we used to remember as ‘normal’ before all this happened”. More

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      A mother’s happy day: military spouse deported by Trump returns to family

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      Three years ago Alejandra Juarez fell victim to Donald Trump’s cruelty as the wife of a decorated US Marine Corps veteran and mother of two young US citizen daughters was deported to Mexico under the former president’s zero-tolerance immigration policies.On Saturday Juarez will rejoin her family in Florida as one of the first beneficiaries of a humanitarian program set up by Joe Biden’s administration to reunify parents Trump separated from their children.But while Juarez’s Mother’s Day weekend reunion with daughters Pamela, 19, Estela, 11, and husband Temo will close a lengthy, painful journey of isolation and depression, she sees it as a door opening for other families torn apart by deportation.“I’m happy this is behind me and my family, and hoping this will lead to a permanent solution not only for military spouses like myself, but for everyone,” she told the Guardian from Mérida, Mexico, where she has been living since being forced from her home in Davenport, Florida, in 2018.“I hope it will have a domino effect and bring many more people back.”The Biden administration’s family reunification taskforce was set up by the new president’s executive order in February and began returning some of those “unjustly separated at the US-Mexico border” during the Trump era this week by granting them “humanitarian parole”.The numbers, however, are uncertain. The homeland security department (DHS) taskforce has been working to identify cases, but admits finding them all will be a lengthy process. It is scheduled to deliver its first report on 2 June.Also unclear is how many military families were affected by what Biden has called the “human tragedy” of separations during the four years Trump was in office. Federal agencies do not record military service in immigration cases, but a 2018 report by the advocacy group American Families United estimated that up to 11,800 active service men and women, all US citizens or permanent residents, had a spouse vulnerable to deportation.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary who is also the taskforce’s chair, said this week’s first wave of reunifications was “just the beginning”.“Many more will follow, and we recognize the importance of providing these families with the stability and resources they need to heal,” he said, noting the taskforce was “exploring options” for long-term legal stability for reunified families.Juarez, 41, and her 43-year-old husband Cuauhtemoc, known as Temo, were both born in Mexico. But while he came to the US legally as a child and was naturalized in 2002, shortly before a 16-month deployment in Iraq, she spent the 18 years of their marriage until her deportation undocumented.As a teenager she was caught crossing the border illegally and chose to sign a document in English she said she didn’t understand and return to Mexico voluntarily instead of being placed in detention. The document permanently forfeited her right to legal status, which she did not discover until after her marriage.She returned to the US and lived anonymously in Florida with her husband until a traffic stop in 2013 exposed her undocumented status. Even then, under the more relaxed policies of Barack Obama’s administration, she was allowed to stay with twice-yearly check-ins with immigration authorities.Juarez self-deported in 2018 after Trump implemented his no-tolerance approach, and before authorities could enforce a removal order issued against her. She rented an apartment in Mexico with Estela while her husband remained in Florida to run his roofing business and allow Pamela to finish high school, but with money running out and two households to run, visits to Mexico became less frequent.When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Juarez said, her jobs teaching English slowed up and Estela returned to Florida. The knowledge her daughters were growing up without their mother, she said, caused her depression for which she needed therapy.Darren Soto, a Florida Democratic US congressman, lobbied the White House for Juarez to be allowed to return, and has introduced the Protect Patriot Spouses Act to Congress to protect military families from deportations.“President Trump’s administration was an aberration in American history with regard to immigration. Now we have humanitarian considerations, which are American values, reincorporated into our federal government,” said Soto, who also backs the American Families United Act that would allow some undocumented immigrants with US citizen family members to stay.“It’s been a long time coming, but Alejandra never gave up on us and we never gave up on her. They’ve missed almost three years of cherished memories together and it’s been traumatic for all of them.”Juarez said she was grateful for the efforts of Soto, her immigration lawyers and daughter Estela, who was one of her mother’s biggest cheerleaders. The 11-year-old excoriated Trump at last year’s Democratic national convention, reading a letter in which she told him: “You tore our world apart.”In January, she appealed for Biden’s help in an emotional video in which she likened her father’s military service to that of the new president’s late son Beau. Estela, Juarez said, is documenting the family’s story in a forthcoming book titled Until Someone Listens.For now, Juarez said, her intention is making up for lost time.“They need my cooking and they already told me what they want for breakfast on Sunday, so I’ll go grocery shopping like I always did, make breakfast for all of them and go to church like we used to,” she said. “I just want to enjoy my house and my family again.” More

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      To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him | Joel Wertheimer

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      In president Joe Biden’s first address to Congress last week, he celebrated the $1.9tn relief plan that passed within the first days of his presidency and proposed an ambitious $4tn plan for family care, green infrastructure, education and jobs that Democrats might have been surprised to hear from even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. To understand how Biden, the 78-year-old self-proclaimed moderate, came to push such an ambitious and progressive domestic policy agenda, you can start by looking at the young lanyard-wearing staffers who populate the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building.Policy decisions in Washington are made by the principals – the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries – but their decisions are significantly constrained by the information they receive. I served as associate staff secretary to President Obama from 2015 until the end of his term, building his briefing book and ensuring the appropriate staff edited and commented on the memos he received, and I saw how this information shaped the president’s choices. The president’s staff give the president a policy menu of memos, data and updates on government programmes. Extending the menu analogy, presidential decision-making looks a lot more like choosing from a few items on the prix fixe than dictating a specific meal to a private chef.And what the meal looks like depends on how it’s described. Was the American economy strong for working Americans in 2015 because unemployment was low, or was the economy not nearly at full employment because the employment-to-population ratio had not recovered sufficiently from the Great Recession? That depends on the views of the members of the Council of Economic Advisers preparing data memos for the president. Should the administration pursue a carbon tax because it is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular, or should the administration pursue a more popular and less effective green energy policy? That in turn depends on what the data crunchers throughout the administration tell the principals, and how staff define what’s “popular”: is it what the polls say, or the consensus among Washington pundits?So Biden’s decisions, like those of any president, are heavily influenced by what the staffers who populate the White House tell him. The new cohort of staff, who joined the administration when Biden took office, have fundamentally different views and experiences to those who worked under Obama’s presidency 12 years ago. Indeed, many of those staffers, myself included, saw Republicans block Obama at every turn, threatening to breach the debt ceiling in 2011, refusing to agree to additional stimulus when it was obviously necessary in 2013 and 2014, and preventing Merrick Garland from joining the supreme court. That was before the Republicans led America into a Donald Trump presidency, which exposed their austerity concerns as bogus and ended in an attempted coup.The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals to join them. And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.Beyond their economic experiences, they are also more diverse than their forebears. The Biden administration announced in January that of its first 100appointees, over half were women and people of colour. Even young white Democrats, spurred by activists and protesters across the country, are significantly more progressive on racial justice and immigration issues than they would have been four or eight years ago. Many of the staffers who now occupy the White House worked for the Senate offices and primary campaigns of Warren and Sanders. Those senators didn’t win the primary, but their ideas can still be found in the White House, at least on domestic policy.Yet while Democratic staff largely agree on most domestic issues, from transgender rights to increasing the power of workers, resistance still exists among some principals on other issues. The White House still remains hesitant over marijuana policy, for example; Biden is unwilling to join the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, in calling for a full legalisation of marijuana, and instead favours decriminalisation. And the Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging. The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” – from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies – led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.Moving beyond what America should not do – like invade Iraq for no good reason – to the question of what America should do on the global stage will require leftwing Democrats to produce a robust, positive vision of American foreign policy. Foreign policy often involves making hard choices from a menu containing only bad options, and the left remains split over how to make those choices. Knee-jerk interventionism is bad, but so are China’s “re-education” camps and anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong. Sanctions often harm the people they’re intended to help, but how else should the United States fight back against the tide of rightwing authoritarianism?As in the domestic sphere, there is space here for a younger, more diverse generation to begin to shift the paradigm. If Biden’s presidency is remembered as more progressive than anyone anticipated, they will have played no small part in making it so. More

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      Biden raises US refugee admissions cap to 62,500 after delay sparks anger

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      Joe Biden has formally raised the US cap on refugee admissions to 62,500 this year, weeks after facing bipartisan blowback for his delay in replacing the record-low ceiling set by Donald Trump.Refugee resettlement agencies have waited for Biden to quadruple the number of refugees allowed into the United States this year since 12 February, when a presidential proposal was submitted to Congress saying he planned to do so.But the presidential determination went unsigned until Monday. Biden said he first needed to expand the narrow eligibility criteria put in place by Trump that had kept out most refugees. He did that last month in an emergency determination, which also stated that Trump’s cap of up to 15,000 refugees this year “remains justified by humanitarian concerns and is otherwise in the national interest”.That brought sharp pushback for not at least taking the symbolic step of authorizing more refugees to enter the US this year, and within hours the White House made a quick course correction. The administration vowed to increase the historically low cap by 15 May – but probably not all the way to the 62,500 Biden had previously outlined.In the end, Biden returned to that figure.“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden stated before signing the emergency presidential determination.Biden said Trump’s cap “did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees”.But he acknowledged the “sad truth” that the US would not meet the 62,500 cap by the end of the fiscal year in September, given the pandemic and limitations on the country’s resettlement capabilities – some of which his administration has attributed to the Trump administration’s policies to restrict immigration.Biden said it was important to lift the number to show “America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world”.The move also paves the way for Biden to boost the cap to 125,000 for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts in October.Since the fiscal year began last 1 October, just over 2,000 refugees have been resettled in the US.Refugee resettlement agencies applauded Biden’s action.“We are absolutely thrilled and relieved for so many refugee families all across the world who look to the US for protection,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine resettlement agencies in the country. “It has a felt like a rollercoaster ride, but this is one critical step toward rebuilding the program and returning the US to our global humanitarian leadership role.”Biden has also added more slots for refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central America and ended Trump’s restrictions on resettlements from Somalia, Syria and Yemen.“We are dealing with a refugee resettlement process that has been eviscerated by the previous administration and we are still in a pandemic,” said Mark Hetfield, president of Hias, a Maryland-based Jewish non-profit that resettles refugees. “It is a challenge, but it’s important he sends a message to the world that the US is back and prepared to welcome refugees again.” More