Forty-one Democrat mayors and county officials wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking his administration to grant parole and work permits for millions of illegal immigrants residing in the United States.

“Our request is rooted in the belief that extending the dignity of legal authorization to work for our residents born in Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and other countries would be a positive step forward,” the Democrats wrote in the May 23 letter (pdf).

They noted that roughly 11.3 million American citizens today share a home with an undocumented individual. As such, this issue is critical in certain “key electoral states” like Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, they wrote.

Democrats asked the Department of Homeland Security to “leverage its authority” to grant parole for both long-term and recent illegal immigrants, thus qualifying them for work authorization. Allowing illegal immigrants to legally work in the country would result in higher wages, shield them from workplace exploitation, and enable them to contribute to the economy, they said.

The letter claimed that legal work done by illegal aliens would bring in an estimated $13.8 billion annually in tax contributions. Citing a U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) prediction, Democrats said that “new arriving immigrants” could boost the U.S. GDP by $7 trillion over the next 10 years, without specifying whether they were legal or not.

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