The Democratic-led House on Thursday voted to create a path to citizenship for an estimated four million undocumented immigrants, and reopening a politically charged debate over the country’s broken immigration system, just as President Biden a growing confrontation of migration at the border.
In an almost party vote of 228 to 197, the House first began setting up a permanent legal route for more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants, including those brought to the United States as children known as dreamers, and others who are temporarily protected. Status for humanitarian reasons. Only nine Republicans voted yes.
Hours later, lawmakers approved a second measure with more dual support that would eventually give nearly a million farm workers and their families legal status while updating an important agricultural visa program. This time, 30 Republicans, many of whom represent the agrarian-heavy districts, joined almost every Democrat to vote in favor.
The votes were important milestones for the Dreamers and other activists who waged a decade-long campaign, often at great personal risk, to bring the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States out of the shadows. Dreamers, those who have temporary status and agricultural workers in many cases live for long periods in the United States and measures to normalize their status enjoy broad public support.
By taking a quick look at both bills, the House leaders have been waiting for the exception of relatively narrow but publicly popular immigration solutions to stir up a stuck policy debate after years of failed attempts at more comprehensive immigration legislation and delivering an important constituency .
“This House has another chance to pass HR 6 and put an end once and for all to the fears and insecurities that plagued the lives of America’s dreamers, which are an integral part of the fabric of American society. became Democratic representative Lucille Roybal-Allard. of California and an author of the Dreamer Bill, said during a heated debate in the Capitol. “It’s an issue about who we are as Americans.”
But after clashing with a wave of hard-line Republican opposition in the House, the bills are now being strongly confronted in the equally divided Senate. While some Republicans there have pledged support to Dreamers in the past, their party is increasingly uniting behind a tough strategy to deny the president the votes he needs to make a new immigration law and use the deteriorating situation at the border as a political hug. .
“There is currently no road to anything,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and a key player in the former dual immigration, said this week.
This means that the immigration measures will join a growing stack of liberal agenda items that have surpassed the House but are destined to disappear due to Republican opposition in the Senate. These include an extension of voting rights, new gun control measures, the most important labor legislation in decades and the LGBTQ equality law.
Democrats in favor of eliminating or changing the filibuster believe the accumulating pressure behind the bills could help break the dam due to changing Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote requirement to defeat procedural tactics and to pass legislation by a simple majority.
A preview of the difficult road ahead, Republicans of the House on Thursday denounced immigration measures as ‘amnesty’ for lawbreakers and accused Democrats of wanting to open the borders to foreigners who would take American jobs and the coronavirus wear.
The legislation passed on Thursday will have no effect on border enforcement. But Republicans have argued that any move to grant legal status to immigrants who have come to the country illegally in the past will only fuel such migration in the future.
‘Why are so many children being placed in the hands of Mexican criminal cartels and forced to suffer the 2,000-mile trail to our border? Because it works, ”said Representative Tom McClintock, a Republican from California. ‘This bill proves that the Mexican crime cartels are right. You are admitted to our country and only have to wait until the next amnesty. ”
Instead of focusing on those who would benefit from the bill, the Republicans put much of the debate to Mr. Biden devoted to the problems on the southwestern border, which some Republicans used to call ‘the Biden border crisis’. They have moved quickly over the past few weeks to blame the president for the increasing number of migrants wanting to enter the country, many of them unaccompanied children, although they never criticized Donald J. Trump during his presidency for the same phenomenon.
Republican strategists hope the issue will revive the party base and sway enough independent voters worried about their dark warnings of violence to help their party regain control of the House and Senate in 2022.
Mr. Biden’s best immigration advisers have directly acknowledged the scale of the challenge over the past few days. They also pleaded for time to make short- and long-term changes that they hope will bring greater order to a region that has plagued the last four presidents.
This includes the more ambitious immigration overhaul of Mr. Biden, the U.S. citizenship law that would legalize nearly all undocumented immigrants in the country, provide money to secure access gates and expedite asylum processing, expand legal immigration, and pump $ 4 billion into Central American countries that have sent a flood of asylum seekers north to the U.S. border in recent years.
Douglas Rivlin, the communications director of the immigrant advocacy organization America’s Voice, said the bill remains the ‘North Star’ for activists. But groups like him helped forge a strategy to try to narrow down bills for dreamers and farm workers to test the waters.
“If anything is going to get 60 votes and build a coalition around it, it is these two bills for deep-rooted long-term immigrants and deep-rooted agriculture in many places,” he said. “It allows us to see where Republicans are.”
House Democratic leaders have also promised to discuss the citizenship law of Mr. Bid to vote. For now, however, their own members are divided over it, with moderate and progressive fighters over border security provisions.
And in the Senate, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez and a main sponsor of the plan said this week that he will try to determine “whether we can merge enough people to have a bigger, broader effort.”
Progressive and immigrant activists are not holding their breath. They are already pushing Democratic leaders to find a way to force through broad immigration changes without the minority party, also by blowing up the filibuster.
Another option they are discussing is to tackle a comprehensive legalization measure with a large work and infrastructure package that enjoys dual support, by including legislation that gives millions of undocumented essential workers a path to citizenship.
The deadlock on immigration policy is nothing new to Congress. Attempts at comprehensive reform have failed under the last three presidents, even in moments of greater political alignment over the issue between Democrats and Republicans.
It was the act of Congress that led President Barack Obama in 2012 to draft the Defered Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, to provide temporary, renewable work permits and deportation protection to Dreamers. About 700,000 people signed up for the program before Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to end it.
The U.S. Dream and Promise Act would provide a path to citizenship for all DACA recipients and other dreamers who have not yet enrolled, and promise permanent legal status in exchange for higher education, employment, or military service. The bill will also include hundreds of thousands of people with temporary protected status granted to immigrants from countries devastated by natural disasters or violence, and those with a similar status known as Deferred Enforcement are often extended in cases where immigrants under persecution or danger if they are returned to their homeland.
The Farm Workers Modernization Act deals with groups that are rarely seen or noticed by the public: the number of migrant workers who grow and harvest much of the country’s food supply.
Unlike the Dreamers bill, it is the result of lengthy bilateral negotiations and negotiations with farm workers and their employers. The resulting compromise would create a program for farm workers, their spouses and their children to obtain legal status if they continue to work in agriculture and pay a $ 1,000 fine; change the temporary agricultural worker visa program to stabilize the wage fluctuation and include the dairy industry; and establish 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 bring hundreds of thousands of farm workers out of the shadows, preserve the influx of migrant workers willing to do hard labor, what Americans increasingly do not want to do, and stability in the country’s promote food supply that has become more. urgent during the pandemic.
“The United States is a country of law and order. We must continue to reform our broken immigration laws and improve our border security, ”said Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington and one of the lead authors of the bill. “That is exactly what this legislation will do.”