ImmigrationBipartisan group of senators offers sweeping immigration reform
A bipartisan group of eight senators yesterday unveiled a proposal to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, a proposal which will form the basis of a bill that its backers hope to introduce to the Senate by March. Today, President Barack Obama is delivering a major speech on immigration in Nevada, and White house sources say that the specific proposals in his speech will dovetail with the senators’ proposal.
Demonstrators calling for immegration reform // Source: usqiaobao.com
A bipartisan group of eight senators yesterday unveiled a proposal to overall the U.S. immigration system, a proposal which will form the basis of a bill that its backers hope to introduced to the Senate by March.
Today, President Barack Obama is delivering a major speech on immigration in Nevada, and White house sources say that the specific proposals in his speech will dovetail with the senators’ proposal.
The senators offered a five-page draft outline of the principles undergirding the bill they plan to introduce. The senators said they would create “a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the U.S. that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required.”
The four main principles of the plan are: border enforcement, employer enforcement, the handling of the flow of legal immigration (including temporary agricultural workers and high-skilled engineers), and a pathway to citizenship for those who entered the nation illegally. McCain called the pathway to citizenship the “most controversial piece of immigration reform,” saying that the current situation amounts to “de facto amnesty” and that the illegal immigrants deserve a chance to live legally in the country and ultimately become citizens.
“We have been too content for too long to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes and even watch our children, while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great,” he said. “I think everyone agrees that it’s not beneficial to our country to have these people hidden in the shadows.”
The group includes Senators John McCain (R-Arizona), Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Robert Menendez (R-New Jersey), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), and Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) .
Schumer said: “We believe this will be the year Congress finally gets this done. The politics of immigration reform had been turned upside down: for the first time ever, there’s more political risk [to] opposing immigration reform than supporting it.”
McCain was direct in his assessment of why Republicans would support an immigration reform effort now, rather than oppose it, as they did in 2007, when George W. Bush sent an immigration reform bill to the Senate, where the bill died. “Elections. Elections. The Republican party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens,” McCain said.
The Guardian reports that a potential sticking point for the Republican-dominated House is how precisely to devise a pathway to citizenship for the eleven million undocumented immigrants already inside the country.
The senators’ proposals follow Rubio’s lead by creating two ring-fenced stages in the transition to citizenship. First, an undocumented immigrant would have to register with the U.S. authorities and pass stringent tests — including a background check to discover those with a criminal record and payment of fines and back taxes — to be awarded a right to work in the United States for a probationary period.
Then, in a separate process, they would be allowed to apply for citizenship. In doing so, however, they would have to go to the back of the line – behind applicants for citizenship who never broke U.S. law by entering the country illegally — learn English and basic American history, and could have to wait for years before earning a green card.
“There are 11 million human beings in this country today who are undocumented,” Rubio said at the launch of the senators’ plan. “That’s not something anyone is happy about, but it is the situation, and we need to find a way of addressing it in a way that is fair to those people who are waiting in line the legal way.”
The senators also highlighted the need to bolster security along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent more undocumented immigrants from entering the country.
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