June 21 — A day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reverse his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as the parents are prosecuted, Congress took up legislation to reform the nation’s immigration and employment laws.
If legislation is enacted, it would make sweeping changes to policies affecting political asylum, guest worker programs, employment-verification requirements, transnational criminal organizations, border security and the legal status of foreign-born people who were brought to United States as children.
But the question of “if” is a big one.
A Longstanding Impasse
Congress’s track record in enacting immigration legislation is not good. Despite the need to clarify the nation’s laws, its members have not enacted major immigration reforms since 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
The lack of clarity in the U.S. immigration law is one of the primary issues that then-candidate Donald Trump ran on in the 2016 presidential election. He promised he would take action to solve the political standoff. And he told voters action would begin with the construction of a wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border.
A year and a half into his term, Trump does not have much to show his supporters except, perhaps, his strict enforcement of the law. And that policy, which included separating children from their parents, has proven to be more politically problematic than useful.
Since 2017, members of Congress have introduced hundreds of bills to change immigration laws. Of the 200 bills introduced in the House, only 14 made it into committee review and six have cleared the House chamber. The only bill related at all to immigration that has actually made into law is one that makes minor changes to the visa fee for workers from the Northern Mariana Islands.
Midterm Election Pressure Mounting
With midterm elections coming up in November, the pressure is mounting for Trump and Congress.
Meeting with House Republicans at the White House on Wednesday, Trump pressed them to get something — anything — passed.
“We have record-setting numbers in every way economically, but we want to solve this immigration problem, which is going on for 40 years, more,” Trump said, according to the official transcript. “It’s been going on forever.”
Intra-Party Conflict
The problem is not only a partisan divide. It is also an intra-party conflict.
House members spent the day debating two Republican bills. The first one, H.R. 4760, considered by some a “hardline” bill. Among other things, it would have mandated the eVerify employment-verification program for non-agricultural workers. It also would have replaced the family-preference lottery system, often called “chain migration,” with a merit-based system for granting visas. It proposed to spend $25 billion on border security, including $16.6 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The House voted the bill down on a 231-193 vote with 41 Republicans and 190 Democrats voting against it.
Just prior to the vote, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, called it a McCaul a chance to make “historic” and “generational change.”
The ‘Consensus’ Bill
Some supporters are calling the second bill, H.R. 6136, a consensus plan largely because it has more support than the first. But it’s still not clear it has enough support to clear the House, and that’s probably why leaders posted the vote on it until Friday.
The 299-page bill would provide $25 billion for border security, including $9.3 billion construction of a border — slightly less than the first bill.
Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Washington, said it is the only bill that includes “all four pillars” of Trump’s immigration plan.
“This is our one shot to get this done,” Newhouse said. “Congress can legislation on this; Congress must legislate on this.”
From ‘Dreamers’ to ‘DACA’ Population
A primary point of contention is the lack of clarity in the law for a population of roughly 700,000 people who came to the United States as children.
Once called “Dreamers” for legislation first introduced in 2001 to grant legal permanent residency to the minors, the population is now referred to as the ‘DACA’ recipients. That name comes from an acronym for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program, which President Barrack Obama put forward in 2012.
The problem, according to some lawmakers, is that DACA incentivizes children to migrate to the United States.
“Prior to that, somewhere between 3,000 or 4,000 unaccompanied children from Central America came into this country,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin. “Then DACA was instituted in 2012, and that problem skyrocketed.”
Meanwhile, many members of Congress are sympathetic to people who came to the United States as children.
“We’ve been struggling for years on how to find the answer for how to find deal with these ‘Dreamers’.” said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. He said many members have real “care and concern” for people who live in their district want to “come out of the shadows” by gaining legal status.
But it’s that legal status that leads others like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and anti-immigration group, to call the legislation “as a massive amnesty vehicle.”
And that leaves members like Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Florida, a proponent for immigration reform and a member of the Problem-Solvers Caucus, feeling frustrated.
“That’s the problem,” Curbelo said. “Nothings ever been good enough.”
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