DACA action bogs down in family debate
GOP opposes allowing young immigrants to sponsor parents for legal status
WASHINGTON — As the Senate considers protections for young immigrants, the debate has quickly turned to the question of whether those who achieve legal status should be able to sponsor loved ones to join them in the United States.
The White House, with legislation crafted by GOP leaders, wants to block future immigrants from being able to petition for relatives beyond spouses and minor children. President Donald Trump rejects what he calls “chain migration,” a term others view as derisive, in favor of giving visas to immigrants with specific technology skills or other sought-after experience.
Morespecifically, Republicans want to prevent the nearly 700,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program from helping the parents whobrought them to the U.S. illegally as children earn permanent legal status. GOP senators bristle at the idea of favoring the parents while other would-be immigrants endure a decades-long waiting list for visas.
“We have to end the practice of extended-family chain migration, because we’d create a whole new pool of immigrants who could bring in their parents who created the problem in the first place,” Sen. Tom Cotton, RArk., said Monday on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.
DACA participants — the so-called Dreamers — /// were given temporary work permits and protected from deportation under the Obama-era programPresident Donald Trump wants to terminate.
For decades, family migration has been the bedrock of U.S. immigration law, rooted in the belief that immigrants should be able to unify their families. While there are no Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., cited Olympic gold medalist Chloe Kim’s father as someone who immigrated to the U.S. not knowing the language, but became successful. limits on a new citizen’s ability to sponsor their spouse, children and parents, immigration law imposes strict caps on visas for other relatives. The only other relatives allowed to be sponsored are siblings and adult children — not grandparents, aunts or uncles of citizens or green card holders, as Cotton and others claim.
About 240,000 slots are available a year, creating a backlog that now counts nearly 4 million applicants, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The wait from some countries, including Mexico, stretches 20 years.
Many young immigrants and those in the DACA program fear their parents could face deportation unless they, too, can apply for legal status. Current law requires those here illegally to return to their home countries for 10 years before they can apply to re-enter the U.S. Experts say most are unlikely to do so.
“For many people, if it’s a choice between staying here as they’ve been, and living a bit in the shadows, or separating from their families for 10 years to get a green card, many would rather stay with their families and tough it out,” said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Mi- gration Policy Institute
For Democrats, it’s not that they oppose creating more visas for high-skilled immigrants, as Republicans and other Democrats propose, but they don’t want to dramatically reduce the number of slots available in the family program to prioritize others now favored.
And more fundamentally, Democrats — and, increasingly, some Republicans — reject the notion of transforming the immigration systemas Trumphasenvisioned — with fewer immigrants from poorer countries and more from places, as the president has suggested, like Norway.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told the story Tuesday of a Korean immigrant who came to the United States knowing little English, but earned an education and started a family. His daughter, Chloe Kim, is the young American snowboarding champion who captured a gold medal this week in the Olympics.
The Senate was to launch an unusually open debate this week as Congress scrambles to come up with a legislative solution for the DACA recipients. But action ground to a halt Tuesday amid partisan infighting.
Republicans blamed Democrats for stalling debate while Democrats complained that Republicans were proposing bills that go far beyond the debate over DACA and border security that most senators agree should be addressed.
“Once you go outside the boundaries of border security, Dreamers, experience shows, you run amok,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said all ideas should be allowed to come forward for votes. Despite the standstill, he expects to finish the bill this week.