by Mimi Nguyen Ly
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is set to vote on two immigration bills that would provide a citizenship path for undocumented immigrants and legal status for immigrant farmworkers. House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer (DMd.) told reporters that the House would take up the bills on March 18 after they cleared a procedural hurdle on March 16. Neither bill was taken up in the Senate when it had a Republican major ity.
With Democrats now holding narrow control of the upper chamber, they hope to be able to attract some Republican support. The American Dream and Promise Act would offer a pathway to citizenship to those who entered the country undocumentedly as children and are currently living in the United States, also known as “Dreamers.” The same bill would also help immigrants in the country who received temporary migration protections. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.). An estimated 4.4 million undocumented immigrants could become eligible for permanent residency if the bill is passed, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
In 2019, seven Republicans joined 230 Democrats in the House in voting for the bill. The other immigration bill, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, would provide undocumented immigrant agricultural workers a path to legal status, and make the H-2A guestworker program more flexible for employers. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and has a Republican cosponsor, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.).
It passed the House in 2019 with the support of 34 Republicans. Hoyer said on March 16: “These two bills are not the fix, but they are [a] fix to part of the problem.
But we need to pass comprehensive immigration reform and we’re going to do so in the coming months.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) wears a mask while speaking to reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 11, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images) Rep.
Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on Immigration, said on March 16 that the two bills are “implicitly promising the next generation [that] all they have to do is get here and their turn will come.” The two bills each address portions of a larger, radical immigration reform bill that Democrats formal CITIZENSHIP ly introduced last month in both the House and the Senate with the support of President Joe Biden, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021.
This bill models closely Biden’s sweeping proposal he sent to Congress on his first day in office. It would provide an eight-year pathway to U.S. citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Its lead sponsors are Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep.
Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.). The bill doesn’t offer any enhanced border security, which past immigration negotiations have used as a way to win Republican votes. The bill would need the support of at least 10 Republicans in the Senate to pass. Sen. Dick Durbin (DIll.), the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said on March 15 that he doesn’t believe that the Biden-backed bill would have enough backing in either chamber. But he promised that the House would eventually pass a more far-reaching immigration reform plan. Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the leading Republicans in past talks on immigration, said he believed bipartisan progress on immigration legislation would be “much harder” amid a surge in undocumented immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border. “Why would you legalize anybody, sending another incentive to keep coming, until you stop the flow?” he told a reporter on Capitol Hill. “I think it’s going to be really hard to get a bipartisan bill put together on anything that has a legalization component until you stop the flow.”
(Shared from ET)
