04/04/2013
Outline of House version of 2013 Immigration Reform Act
Today the New York Times reports that the House version of
the 2013 Immigration Reform Act may be introduced before the Senate version
being drafted by the Gang of 8.
More importantly, the House version has some very important
provisions that the Senate bill apparently does not. Only a
few details were included in the story, but enough information has been
reported to show major differences in the two bills, some good, some not so
good.
For example:
1.
The House version provides three separate ways
for undocumented people to obtain legal status
2.
The first way is for DREAMERS, the children who
were brought here by their parents or otherwise came to the US through no fault
of their own.
a. They
will have a pathway to citizenship (and presumably to Legal Permanent Resident
(LPR) status – i.e., the green card -- first.
3.
The second group to have a path to LPR status
includes immigrants who have a family member or an employer who will sponsor them
for LPR status. (This appears to be a
resurrection of prior Section 245i, which expired on April 30, 2001, and had
several specific requirements for a person who wanted to benefit from its use. One of the main benefits was to relieve the
person from the duty to consular process.)
a. For
people who will qualify here, it appears that the bill unfortunately will
require them to consular process for their green cards.
b. Before
doing so, the person will have to
i.
pay a fine (as with 245i),
ii.
pay back taxes for some period of time, and
iii.
learn basic English.
c. However,
a person who has been here for more than a year without permission and who then
leaves the US, is subject to a 10 year bar (or a 3 year bar if here without
permission for more than 180 days but less than one year). In addition, many of the undocumented
population are subject to a 10 year bar without provision for any waiver under
current law. (This is commonly referred
to as the “permanent” bar, even though it actually is not permanent all the
time.)
d. This
bill will waive or relax these bars, a step that is long overdue: the purpose of the bars was to keep people
out of the US; all they have done is to keep people here.
e. See
below, however, for serious concerns about requiring this group to consular process.
4.
The last group is everyone else; they will have
to
a. Take
responsibility for and admit to breaking the law when they entered without
being inspected or overstayed their visas.
b. Pay
a fine
c. Pay
back taxes for some period of time
d. Learn
basic English
Once this group has processed for
temporary legal status, they would have the right to file for the green card
through regular, existing channels after having legal status for 10 years, and
then apply for citizenship after 5 more years.
(This new category is quite similar to the H-5 visa proposed by Senators
McCain and Kennedy in 2004-05.)
5.
There is no guest worker provision in the bill,
such as the W visa included in the Senate bill. That provision is designed to address future
labor needs beginning in 2015.
Unresolved issues include whether government benefits will be
available to the third group, and whether certain border security goals would
have to be met before the third group (and perhaps the second group) could file
for the green card. This “move the goal posts back” strategy has been used over
and over again by the anti-immigrant forces in Congress and elsewhere, and has
prevented any rational debate, and in effect has crushed honest hopes of a
final compromise over and over again.
If this provision is included in the draft that is introduced, it may
doom the effort at reasonable reform.
Another serious problem with the “new 245i” law is that it will
require millions of essential workers to leave the US and file cases at US
embassies in various countries, but mainly in Mexico because Mexican citizens
make up the largest percentage of our undocumented population. There are two critical aspects to this
problem:
1.
There is no way to gauge the harm that this will
cause our economy, but it could be devastating, especially if the new legal status
rules include a time limit within which to file and process a case (this was
the case with 245i – during its last period of incarnation, it was possible to
file between December 21, 2000 and April 30, 2001).
2.
The US Embassy in Ciudad Juarez (CDJ), which
processes all green cards for applicants in that country, will be overrun and its
operations probably will come to a grinding halt. If Congress is going to relax or rescind the
3/10/permanent bars, there is no reason to require new beneficiaries to make a
meaningless trip to CDJ to finish the case.
Finally, the lack of a visa like the Senate bill’s W visa is
very troubling. Without that kind of
visa in our system, we are almost guaranteed to end up in the same mess that we
are in today. The primary reason that
we have so many undocumented people in the US today is due to the lack of a
temporary visa for workers in year round jobs who do not have or need to have a
college degree; i.e., manual labor. The
US had that visa from 1942-64 – the so-called Bracero Program. Congress deleted it when it re-did the
entire system in 1965. For some years
that made sense, but with current demands for essential workers continuing to
climb, it makes no sense to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
We hope that the bills will be reconciled in a productive
Conference Committee, and that we will see a smart bill in the final analysis.
Gerry Chapman
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