The Democratic-led House voted on Thursday to create a path for citizenship for some four million undocumented immigrants, reopening a politically charged debate over the country’s failed immigration system, while President Biden faces a growing increase in migrants. in the border.
In a quasi-party vote from 228 to 197, the House first moved to establish a permanent legal path for more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants, including those brought to the United States as children, known as Dreamers, and others with protection Temporary status granted for humanitarian reasons. Only nine Republicans voted yes.
Hours later, lawmakers passed a second measure with more bipartisan support that would eventually grant legal status to about one million rural workers and their families, while updating an important agricultural visa program. This time, 30 Republicans, many representing districts with a high concentration of agriculture, joined almost all Democrats to vote in favor.
The votes were significant milestones for Dreamers and other activists who waged a decade-long campaign, often at great personal risk, to cast the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States out of the shadows. Dreamers, those with temporary status and agricultural workers, in many cases, have lived in the United States for long periods, and measures to normalize their status enjoy broad public support.
Moving quickly to consider both projects, House leaders bet that choosing relatively narrow but publicly popular immigration solutions could shake an impasse in political debate after years of failed attempts at more comprehensive immigration legislation and compliance for an electorate. key.
“This Chamber has another chance to approve HR 6 and end once and for all the fear and uncertainty that have plagued the lives of the Dreamers of America, who have become an integral part of the structure of American society”, Congresswoman Lucille Roybal- Allard, a California Democrat and author of the Dreamer bill, said during a heated debate on Capitol Hill. “It is a question of who we are as Americans.”
But after colliding with a wave of fierce Republican opposition in the House, the bills now face great odds in the equally divided Senate. Although some Republicans have pledged support for Dreamers in the past, their party is increasingly coming together behind a hard-line strategy to deny the president the votes he needs to make any new immigration law and use the worsening situation. on the border like a political cudgel.
“There is no way to go now,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a key player in previous bipartisan immigration efforts, this week.
This means that immigration measures will join a growing pile of liberal agenda items that have been approved by the House, but are destined to languish because of the Republican opposition in the Senate. They include a historic expansion of voting rights, new gun control measures, the most significant pro-labor legislation in decades and the LGBTQ Equality Act.
Democrats in favor of removing or changing the obstruction believe that the pressure built up behind these bills can help break the barrier to changing Senate rules to end the 60-vote requirement to defeat procedural tactics and allow legislation be approved by a simple majority.
Giving a preview of the difficult road ahead, House Republicans on Thursday denounced immigration measures as “amnesty” for offenders and accused Democrats of wanting to open the borders to foreigners who would take American jobs and carry the coronavirus.
The legislation passed on Thursday would have no impact on border surveillance. But Republicans argued that any move to grant legal status to immigrants who came to the country illegally in the past would only fuel this migration in the future.
“Why are so many children being placed in the hands of Mexican criminal cartels and forced to undergo the 2,000-mile terror trail to our border? Because it works, ”said Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican. “This project proves that the Mexican crime cartels are right. You will be admitted to our country and only need to wait until the next amnesty. “
Rather than focusing on those who would benefit from the bill, Republicans spent much of the debate targeting Biden for the difficulties on the southwestern border, which some Republicans have come to call the “Biden border crisis”. They have acted quickly in recent weeks to beat the president for the growing number of migrants seeking to enter the country, many of them unaccompanied children, although they never criticized Donald J. Trump for the same phenomenon during his presidency.
Republican strategists hope the issue will awaken the party’s base and influence enough independent voters, alarmed by its gloomy warnings of violence to help its party regain control of the House and Senate in 2022.
Biden’s top immigration advisers have directly recognized the scope of the challenge in recent days. They also begged for time to make short and long-term changes that hope to bring more order to a region that has plagued the last four presidents.
This includes Biden’s most ambitious immigration reform, the US Citizenship Act, which would provide legal status to almost all undocumented immigrants in the country, provide money to secure entry points and speed up the processing of asylum applications, expand immigration legal and pump $ 4 billion to the Central American countries that have sent a flurry of asylum seekers north to the United States border in recent years.
Douglas Rivlin, the communications director for the immigrant advocacy organization, America’s Voice, said the project remains the “star of the north” for activists. But groups like his helped to unite around a strategy to try to come up with narrower accounts for Dreamers and rural workers, first to test the waters.
“If anything is going to get 60 votes and build a coalition around it, it is these two bills for deeply rooted immigrants and for agriculture rooted in many places, red states,” he said. “It allows us to see where the Republicans are.”
Democratic House leaders have also pledged to vote on Biden’s Citizenship Act this year. For now, however, its own members are divided over this, with moderates and progressives disagreeing over border security provisions.
And in the Senate, Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and a major sponsor of the plan, said this week that he would try to determine “whether we can bring enough people together to make a broader and more meaningful effort.”
Progressives and pro-immigration activists are not holding their breath. They are already putting pressure on Democratic leaders to find a way to force broad changes in immigration without the minority party, including blowing up the obstruction.
Another option they are discussing is to package a comprehensive legalization measure with a large package of jobs and infrastructure that enjoys bipartisan support, including legislation that provides a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented essential workers.
The stalemate in immigration policy is nothing new for Congress. Attempts at comprehensive reform have failed in the past three presidents, even at times of greater political alignment on the issue between Democrats and Republicans.
It was the inertia of Congress that led President Barack Obama, in 2012, to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, to provide temporary renewable work permits and protection against deportation for Dreamers. Approximately 700,000 people signed up for the program before Trump tried unsuccessfully to end it.
The American Dream and Promise Act would provide a path to citizenship for all DACA recipients and other Dreamers who did not apply, promising permanent legal status in exchange for higher education, work or military service. The project would also include hundreds of thousands of people with Temporary Protection Status, granted to immigrants from countries devastated by natural disasters or violence, and those who have a similar status known as Deferred Forced Exit, often extended in cases where immigrants would face persecution or danger if they were returned to their country of origin.
The Agricultural Workforce Modernization Act deals with groups rarely seen or noticed by a large part of the public: the large number of migrant agricultural workers who cultivate and harvest much of the country’s food supply.
Unlike the Dreamers’ bill, it is the product of long bipartisan negotiations and bargains with rural workers and their employers. The resulting agreement would create a program for rural workers, their spouses and children to obtain legal status if they continue to work in agriculture and pay a $ 1,000 fine; change the temporary farm worker visa program to stabilize wage fluctuations and include the dairy industry; and institute a mandatory national E-Verify program for employers to confirm that individuals are qualified to work.
Proponents of the bill say the changes will help lift hundreds of thousands of rural workers out of the shadows, preserve the flow of migrant workers who are willing to do hard labor that Americans increasingly will not do, and promote stability in the supply of goods. country that became more urgent during the pandemic.
“The USA is a country of law and order. We must continue to work to reform our violated immigration laws and increase the security of our border, ”said Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican and a leading author of the bill. “This is exactly what this legislation will do.”