Congresswomen propose ambitious immigration overhaul

Most Americans didn’t have email access the last time Charles Kamasaki lobbied for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that actually became law. In 1986, cell phones had barely hit the scene. He envied a co-worker who owned a clunky car phone.

It took years of face-to-face advocacy work before the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it to President Ronald Reagan’s desk. Kamasaki barely saw the inside of his own office while he and his fellow members with the National Council of La Raza, now UnidosUS, haunted the halls of Congress and monitored every subcommittee meeting.

That act increased border enforcement, upped the penalties for hiring illegal workers, and included a pathway to citizenship for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. “It was a bill that died three times before it was enacted,” Kamasaki said. “And if you want to go back even further, antecedents of this bill had been debated since 1952.” No bipartisan, comprehensive reform has made it through since, though Congress nearly passed bills in 2006 and again in 2013.

An ambitious bipartisan overhaul, known as the Dignity Act, might have a chance, Kamasaki said. Reps. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., introduced the act last month. “The Dignity Act is based on the biblical principles of dignity and redemption,” Salazar said in a statement. The proposed legislation boosts border security along with legal immigration. It gives immigrants living in the United States illegally an opportunity to earn legal status. It may take years of legislative ping-pong for the bill to move forward, but experts say it has the potential to gain traction more quickly if something triggers demands for immediate reform.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle admit the immigration situation has reached crisis proportions. Immigration authorities encountered illegal immigrants at the southern border a record 2.76 million times last year. Asylum cases piled up in court, so U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement released thousands of immigrants into the country to await court hearings that are years away. A pending court ruling could end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program this summer, creating an uncertain future for more than 600,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.

And legal immigration has become all but impossible, David Bier, the associate director for immigration studies at the Cato Institute, argued in an analysis released earlier this month. Less than 0.1 percent of refugees are selected for resettlement, and caps on family sponsorship visas mean most immigrants wait for years.

Employer-sponsored immigration is an expensive and lengthy process that is often too difficult for employers to complete. There are no temporary, year-round work visas for lesser-skilled workers without a college education to work in the United States, Bier explained. Employers continue to hire workers who are overstaying their visas and living in the country illegally. About 50 percent of U.S. agricultural laborers are illegal immigrants.

The Dignity Act would create an uncapped, temporary visa program for agricultural workers living in the United States illegally. Farmworkers who worked in an agricultural industry for at least 180 days out of the last two years could apply for the renewable, 5½-year certified agricultural worker visa and later apply for lawful permanent resident status.

The act would also gradually implement an E-Verify system requiring employers to confirm that their employees lived and worked in the United States legally.

El Paso County Commissioner David Stout chairs the Texas Border Coalition, a group of business owners, city officials, and community leaders advocating for federal immigration reform. He supports the bill’s focus on expanding employment-based visas. “Our farmers and ranchers don’t have people to work their fields,” he said. “We have people that are in the construction industry that can’t find people to work on their projects.”

Instead of releasing asylum-seekers into the country to await their hearing, the bill proposes setting up five humanitarian campuses where asylum officers would process claims within 60 days.

“Right now, it’s years in the queue of waiting for an asylum claim,” said Tara Watson, a Brookings Institution economist who focuses on immigration. “They make their home here. And then if their asylum claim is turned down, that’s a very disruptive removal.”

Under the proposal, about 1.9 million children brought to the United States illegally, including the 600,000 DACA recipients, could adjust to 10-year conditional permanent resident status.

Perhaps most controversially, the act would give the more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States a chance to step out of the shadows. Illegal immigrants could only access the legal “Dignity” status if they completed a criminal background check and paid taxes along with $5,000 in restitution. They would also have to contribute to a fund for retraining American workers for high-demand jobs, and they could not receive federal welfare benefits.

“The goal is to recognize that there was a violation of a law,” Watson said. She added the act’s use of fines rather than deportation and family separation is a more “proportionate response to an immigration violation.”

This is different from amnesty, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief and the national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table. It’s a “restitution-based legalization process,” he said. “You have people paying significant restitution for having violated immigration law, but it does make it possible for them to pursue permanent legal status.”

The idea is gaining ground among evangelicals. Last year, Lifeway Research found that 78 percent of evangelicals supported a pathway to permanent status for illegal immigrants if it involved paying restitution—up from 68 percent in a 2015 survey.

Once illegal immigrants completed the seven-year Dignity program, they would have two options. A five-year, renewable Dignity status would allow them to live and work legally in the United States and reenter the country. Or, if they completed the five-year, conditional Redemption program, they could adjust to lawful permanent status.

Reps. Escobar and Salazar paired the bill’s immigration reform measures with several border security initiatives. “That speaks to the fact that there is an appetite in Congress … to deal with this issue, to try to resolve it in a way that can be beneficial for our economy and for national security,” said Christian Penichet-Paul, assistant vice president of policy and advocacy for the National Immigration Forum.

The Dignity Act authorizes at least $35 billion to improve infrastructure between and at ports of entry, including physical barriers and technology. It ups the minimum staffing levels for Border Patrol agents, Office of Field Operations officers, and Customs and Border Protection processing coordinators. And it requires the Department of Homeland Security to expand inspection lanes at ports of entry.

It also moves the border security goal posts away from “operational control,” which is preventing all unlawful entries. Instead, it aims for operational advantage, or finding and responding to high-priority security threats.

So far, the two representatives have recruited 10 co-sponsors: five Democrats and five Republicans. “It could take a few years for something to pass,” said Penichet-Paul. “It could also be quicker than we expect.” Another rush at the U.S.-Mexico border or the consequences of another court ruling on DACA could push Congress to act.