Biden immigration bill would help reunite families, scratch use of ‘alien,’ sponsor says
The U.S. Senate’s lead sponsor of President Joe Biden’s immigration bill laid out more details Thursday of the sweeping reform as he called on business and labor groups to support the effort, noting a host of changes beyond offering an expedited path to citizenship.
In a webinar with about 2,000 business, labor and faith leaders, and immigration advocates, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., highlighted some of the provisions — and the tough fight ahead. He will need at least 60 votes in the Senate for passage.
Calling it a “bold and visionary reform,” Menendez said the bill not only offers a fast-track to legal status for approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants. It also includes measures to help reunite families. And in a symbolic change, it strikes the word “alien” from U.S. immigration documents.
“No longer will we dehumanize the undocumented,” Menendez said during the virtual event sponsored by the American Business Immigration Coalition.
News of the proposed legislation has been well-received by groups that work with immigrants. But while many have expressed a desire to help get the proposal passed in Congress, where the Democrats hold a razor thin majority, they are also anxious to read the bill’s text, which Menendez’s staff is preparing for introduction.
On Thursday, some were making inquiries about what the bill entails and how initiatives like the Obama-era Haitian Family Reunification Parole program, which allows Haitians eligible for a green card in two years to wait it out in the U.S. with relatives, would be affected. The program was terminated by the Trump administration. On Dec. 28, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service published a Federal Register Notice with a 60-day comment period ending Feb. 26, to end the program.
Still, they were hopeful.
“This is not going to be a walk in the park but it’s long overdue,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of Miami-based Americans for Immigrant Justice. “We need to do it not only because it’s the humane thing to do, but for the sake of our economy, so it’s the smart thing to do. We are talking about 11 million people who have lived here for years, even decades, who work hard, pay taxes and have U.S. citizenship children.”
Menendez made a similar argument during the call. He noted that in 2013 when the Senate successfully passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill that failed to pass in the House, congressional budget officers estimated that the legislation would have reduced the national deficit by $850 billion over 20 years. The economy would have grown by more than a trillion dollars within a decade, and nearly $300 billion would have been added to the Social Security trust fund.
“Immigrants across every industry who may not have had legal status but nevertheless paid $32 billion in taxes each year and if given a path to citizenship, would likely add $1.4 trillion to the national [Gross Domestic Product],” Menendez said. “Now that was 2013. I believe that when it comes time to score these numbers with the new reality, those numbers would even be greater.”
The president’s proposed legislation, Menendez said, will not only allow farm workers, so-called “Dreamers” and beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status to get a green card and pursue U.S. citizenship after three years, it will also clear out visa backlogs to allow companies to get access to high-skilled workers in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM.
“We end country caps, we capture unused visas and enable more STEM graduates of our university to stay here and put that knowledge to work for America. After all we educate some of those workers here,” Menendez said.
One of the biggest offerings, he said, is language to strengthen family-based immigration and reverse the Trump administration’s “cruel policies that tore families apart instead of bringing people out of the shadows.”
“This legislation treats spouses and children of green card holders as immediate relatives so they can immediately reunite with their families, and we eliminated discrimination against LGBTQ+ families,” Menendez said, noting that there are several provisions from his Reunited Families Act from the last Congress.
The proposal marks a shift in tone in how immigrants are addressed, and advocates praised the decision to remove the use of the word “alien.”
“I think in many ways it’s a big deal,” Little said. “During the past four years immigrants have been called names that I can’t even mention.”
The symbolic gesture also underscores another theme of the bill, which is to address many of the problems that immigration lawyers and migrants have complained about: the backlog of cases in immigration court, the focus on enforcement rather than family reunification and the separation of children at the U.S. southern border.
All will get additional resources in the proposal, Menendez said, adding that the bill proposes returning to the Obama-era policy of putting in processing centers in Central America to allow young people in harm’s way to apply for asylum abroad instead of making the dangerous journey to the U.S.
For those who do make it, the bill provides money for training and accountability for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers and develops basic minimum standards of care for those in custody, including children. There is also redress for the country’s overburdened and under-resourced immigration courts and additional funding to hire more immigration judges and personnel.
“We will not steal money from our military to spend on a useless wall,” Menendez said. “We will not hire more border agents for the sake of hiring more border agents. We will not trample on our border communities and we will not snatch children away from their parents. Instead we will adopt smarter border controls, we will adopt new technology to manage the border, to combat transnational crime, to screen trade, travel and detect narcotics at every port of entry.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 5:38 PM.
