When Immigration Reform Will Pass
As Congress ends its two-year tenure in Washington, immigration reform advocates are still waiting. As partisan squabbles halted meaningful progress this past year, the prospects of a new Congress and president achieving major immigration changes look grim.
A recent report indicates that Democrats are working on a last-ditch deal with Republicans to pass immigration legislation before 2022 ends. This would create an earned roadmap to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders and immigrant farmworkers.
Keep Families Together
Immigration reform is a catchall term for changes to the laws that govern immigrants and immigration. It is used both by those who want to create a way for undocumented people to eventually get permission to stay in the country and those who want to toughen the system that currently governs immigration.
Immigration is a critical part of a shared prosperity agenda that focuses on improving productivity and quality; limiting wage competition; strengthening labor standards, especially the right to organize and bargain collectively; and providing social safety nets and high-quality lifelong education and training for workers and their families. It also ensures that immigrant workers have access to safe and legal pathways to citizenship.
The Biden administration inherited an enormous challenge in the wake of President Trump’s family separation policy, which led to thousands of children being separated from their parents and other relatives at the border. President Biden believes that families belong together, and is working to reunite parents with their children as quickly as possible.
To reunite families, President Biden has called for the creation of a Task Force to Reunify Families that will work across the government and with key stakeholders and representatives of impacted families to find and reunify any parents and children that remain separated. This task force will report regularly to the President and recommend steps that can be taken to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.
Keeping families together is the key to immigration reform, because it can help foster an environment that encourages assimilation and promotes cultural understanding. It can also protect children and adolescents from the harmful effects of detention, which have been linked to emotional and physical harms, including suicidal thoughts and behavior, incarceration, and violence.
In addition, immigration reform can help keep families together by improving the immigration courts and restoring fairness and balance to our system. It expands family case management programs, reduces immigration court backlogs, provides judges with discretion to review cases and grant relief, improves technology for immigration courts, and authorizes funding for legal orientation programs and counsel for vulnerable individuals and families.
Grow Our Economy
Immigrants make a critical contribution to America’s economic growth and social progress. They create jobs, pay far more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and spawn innovations that have made us world leaders in technology and finance.
However, in the United States today, immigration laws are outdated, restrictive and cumbersome. Combined with rising border and interior enforcement, and a slow-growing economy, they have reduced the net inflow of immigrants. This decline has particularly sharpened among Mexican workers.
Undocumented immigrants have become a growing and often disenfranchised population, unable to secure legal status or access basic social protections. Without these, millions of unauthorized immigrants face deportation and are forced to live and work in the shadows.
If they were able to secure legal status, these undocumented immigrants would be better positioned to contribute to the economy and provide a significant boost to American worker wages and spending power. A recent study finds that providing a pathway to citizenship to the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States would significantly increase their incomes and stimulate the economy over the long term.
Moreover, an influx of legalized immigrants would help lower inflation. The study estimates that a comprehensive program to legalize the unauthorized and enable a future flow of legal workers could add as much as $1.5 trillion to the GDP over a decade.
This is in contrast to a deportation-only policy that would lose a cumulative $2.6 trillion over 10 years. In addition, the report finds that a comprehensive reform with a path to citizenship for the unauthorized would have an even greater effect on the economy.
In addition to boosting the economy, the report shows that a legalization program for unauthorized immigrants can help businesses and communities by lowering hiring costs. It can also help lower wage and price discrimination by ensuring that employers are not required to use fraudulent or borrowed documents to hire unauthorized workers.
It is time for Congress and the administration to put the contributions of undocumented immigrants to work. If we do, it will be a win-win for all Americans. This will make our economy stronger and healthier, while bringing more families together and helping keep the country safe.
Embrace Diversity
Immigration reform is a process that changes the laws and policies governing immigration. It can happen in Congress, at the local government level or by the courts. It is also a political issue that has been used as a wedge in elections.
One of the major challenges that immigration reform faces is a conservative, anti-immigrant base. This has been a factor in many failed efforts to pass immigration reform in the past.
This has included attempts to cut immigration from unauthorized immigrants and limit their ability to bring family members. However, there are also some measures that will embrace diversity and improve the lives of immigrants.
A major part of immigration reform will involve reducing the number of people who are deported from the United States, and allowing undocumented immigrants to work here in order to become citizens over time. This will make it easier for immigrants to build a life for themselves and their families here in the U.S.
In addition, a key component of immigration reform will be to promote integration within American communities. This means helping immigrant communities to feel accepted by their neighbors and to help them integrate into the culture. Cities throughout the world are taking steps to help their citizens become better integrated into their local community by encouraging intercultural awareness and a more welcoming atmosphere for people who are not native-born Americans.
Several cities around the world are offering a variety of opportunities to people to learn about their immigrant neighbors, including walking tours and programs that help immigrants find employment. Chicago, for example, has a program called “Citywide Cultural Diversity” that helps people learn about the cultures of their neighbors through public art and events.
The Netherlands and Toronto are other cities that have adopted initiatives to promote integration. Police commissioners from these countries have taken a few months to shadow local officers and to learn how they can keep immigrants safe while respecting their cultural differences.
This will allow people who want to stay in the country to do so in a way that respects their dignity and allows them to contribute to society. It will also help people who have come here for their education or to start their own business to succeed in the United States.
Promote Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Citizenship
A majority of American voters support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and a recent Gallup poll found that support is even higher among millennials. However, the Trump administration has taken steps that would undermine this path, including its efforts to deport unauthorized immigrants and to limit immigration for those brought to the United States as children.
Immigrants and refugees contribute to the American economy, culture and society as a whole. But we must do better when it comes to integrating them and welcoming them into our country.
One way to help promote integration is through civic engagement, which helps new Americans feel secure in their rights and liberties and provides them with a sense of belonging. The federal government is a major player in civic integration, but many cities and counties also have developed robust integration policy infrastructures that draw on the energy, ideas and work of community-based nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, business, education, faith-based and other institutions.
For example, local governments have created programs to connect immigrant workers to their fields of expertise and to provide cultural events and other programming that build social capital in communities. The federal government should learn from this success and build similar initiatives to help create vibrant communities that welcome and integrate newcomers.
The federal government also must take action to protect the rights of vulnerable populations who need protection from violence and disasters in their home countries. This includes ordering an immediate review of Temporary Protected Status for people who are fleeing war or other conditions that threaten their lives.
In addition, Congress should take action to fix the broken family-based immigration system that allows a per-country cap on the number of families allowed to come to the United States and forces many of these families to wait decades before they can reunite with their relatives here in the U.S. This would help eliminate current backlogs and make it easier for eligible immigrants to reunite with their families in the future.
In order to best address this problem, the federal government needs to focus on creating a strong national integration policy infrastructure that leverages public-private partnerships across levels of government and across different types of immigrant destinations. This will ensure that all newcomers have access to the necessary services and resources to become integrated members of their communities, while protecting the security of our nation.