WASHINGTON — After a year in which Democrats did all they could with razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate, some Northwest Republicans hope a recent turn toward bipartisan legislating could help solve one of the nation’s most intractable policy puzzles: immigration reform.
Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican whose central Washington district is both heavily conservative and 40% Hispanic, introduced a bill Feb. 8 along with six other GOP lawmakers that would bolster border security and give millions of unauthorized immigrants legal status and a potential path to citizenship.
“One only has to look at our southern border right now to know that illegal immigration has reached a crisis point in this country,” Newhouse said in a statement. “Since coming to Congress, reforming our broken system has been one of my top priorities — particularly by ensuring we have a workable guest worker program for our agriculture industry.”
The Dignity Act, led by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., would let unauthorized immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years gain legal status by completing a background check and paying $1,000 a year into a fund to support job training for American workers.
After 10 years in that “Dignity Program,” the immigrants could either continue to work in the country on a renewable visa or enter a five-year “Redemption Program,” which would require them to study English and U.S. civics in order to qualify for permanent resident status and eventually citizenship.
Immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children, known as “Dreamers,” would immediately gain legal status under the proposal, as would those who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years under temporary protections for immigrants who fled danger in their home countries. Newhouse represents more Dreamers than any other House Republican, according to his office.
Salazar’s bill also would boost border security efforts and ramp up enforcement of immigration laws, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, upgrading the technology used to detect illegal crossings and restarting construction of barriers the Biden administration has halted. Those measures would be paid for by an extra 2% income tax levied on Dignity Program participants, who would also be required to buy health insurance without being eligible for federal subsidies.
Many of the bill’s provisions are sure to draw opposition from Democrats. Vanessa Cardenas, deputy director of the progressive immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, said in a statement the legislation is “full of bad ideas based on Republican messaging,” pointing to a “trigger mechanism” in the bill that would require the Department of Homeland Security to certify the U.S.-Mexico border is “fully secure” before the bill’s other provisions take effect.
But advocates of bipartisan immigration reform have hailed it as an opening bid that could kick-start negotiations to fix an immigration system lawmakers across the political spectrum agree is broken. Ali Noorani, president of the more centrist National Immigration Forum, called Salazar’s bill “a constructive step toward immigration reforms that are long overdue.”
Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative, a right-leaning group that mobilizes Latinos in support of limited government, said in an interview Salazar’s bill will test both parties’ commitment to solving problems rather than simply using immigration as a campaign issue.
“This is a real solution to a real problem that we have in America,” he said, “and that it’s coming from the Republicans not only puts the party in a positive light but it also provides the Democrats a true opportunity to negotiate.”
Garza, the son of Mexican immigrants who grew up in central Washington and served on the Toppenish city council before joining the George W. Bush administration, said the debate over U.S. immigration policy has been dominated by the political extremes rather than moderates who could find solutions to a system he called “schizophrenic.”
The U.S. economy has relied on migrant workers since a World War II-era program brought some 4.5 million Mexican men to work on American farms between 1942 and 1964. When that program ended, the demand for labor remained, resulting in a growing number of immigrants working in the country illegally.
Congress tried to fix that problem with a sweeping immigration reform bill passed under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, giving legal status to 2.7 million immigrants already living in the country while providing limited avenues for others to enter and work legally. The law also required employers to check their workers’ papers, but that did little more than create a cottage industry for counterfeit documents.
Subsequent efforts to fix the system — by making it easier to work in the U.S. legally and harder to do so illegally, while giving legal status to immigrants already in the country — have repeatedly come up short in Congress. Today, more than 10 million people live in the United States without legal status, forming a sort of underclass without the same rights as Americans and other lawful residents.
The Border Patrol reported more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2021 fiscal year, the highest number on record, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although some migrants are counted multiple times as they try again to enter the country.
In President Joe Biden’s first year in office, his administration turned back most of those who crossed the border, but more than 458,000 people were allowed to enter the country and try to persuade an immigration judge to let them stay, the New York Times reported. The immigration court system, however, has a backlog of nearly 1.6 million cases and it takes an average of almost five years for a hearing on an immigrant’s asylum claim, according to a tracker maintained by Syracuse University.
Newhouse, a third-generation farmer from Sunnyside, has made reforming the nation’s immigration system a priority since he came to Congress in 2015. Along with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., he shepherded a bipartisan bill through the House that would expand an agricultural guest worker program, mandate tougher enforcement measures and let unauthorized workers gain legal status after paying a fine.
Some of those provisions are included in Salazar’s broader legislation, which could serve as a framework for negotiating a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform bill. After Democrats spent most of 2021 trying to pass bills with no GOP support, a recent pivot in Congress toward bipartisan bills — on issues like the U.S. Postal Service and helping the nation’s economy compete with China — suggests there may be an opening for immigration reform.
Newhouse’s farm workforce bill has stalled in the Senate, where Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo is the lead GOP negotiator in talks with Democrats to make changes that would draw the support from at least 10 Republicans needed to avoid a filibuster.
In an interview, Crapo said those negotiations ground to a halt last year when Democrats chose to try to include immigration reform provisions in a sweeping tax and spending bill rather than negotiate with Republicans.
That effort hit a dead end when the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan referee of sorts, ruled Democrats could not include immigration reform in the bill, which they hoped to pass with only Democratic votes by using a special process that applies only for budget-related legislation.
“All of the bipartisan efforts were basically paused at that point,” Crapo said. “My hope and my expectation is that they will make immigration a priority — that they will not try to pursue it in … a Democrat-only bill — and that we can get back into negotiations on it. And I’m ready to do that.”
A spokeswoman for Crapo’s Democratic counterpart, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, confirmed talks with Crapo’s office are active and ongoing. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who as chair of the Judiciary Committee controls which immigration bills move forward in the Senate, said Feb. 9 he would bring the farm workforce bill up for a vote if it gets enough support from Republicans to clear the 60-vote hurdle needed to pass.
“It’s something that’s long overdue,” Durbin said at the Capitol. “It’s still included in my list of finalists in hopes we can have some immigration reform pass this year.”
For that to happen, pragmatic Democrats and Republicans will need to overcome more strident members of both parties whose all-or-nothing approaches to immigration reform have preserved the status quo.
At the Capitol on Feb. 9, Newhouse said he was hopeful his farm workforce bill will move forward in the Senate, possibly as part of broader legislation based on Salazar’s proposal.
“I think our best chance is right now,” he said, adding that lawmakers will be busy campaigning ahead of November’s elections. “What I’m worried about is we’re going to run out of time. It’s not going to get to the top of the agenda in the Senate if we don’t keep some air to the fire.”
Garza said the response to Salazar’s bill will define both parties’ stances to immigration reform. If Democrats ignore the proposal, he said, “Then you were never serious, because they’re handing you an opportunity here.”
“On the GOP side,” he said, “this is an opportunity for them to seize the demand for reform that would position it as the party of real solutions. I think Salazar is doing them a big favor and they should jump on it.”
In addition to Newhouse and Salazar, the bill is cosponsored by Reps. John Curtis, R-Utah, Pete Sessions, R-Texas, Tom Reed, R-N.Y., and Peter Meijer, R-Mich., and Delegate Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon, R-P.R.
