Biden immigration plan opposed by GOP

Republican WASHINGTON — lawmakers and conservative groups opposed President-elect Joe Biden’s forthcoming immigration plan Tuesday as massive amnesty for people in the U.S. illegally, underscoring that the measure will face an uphill fight in a Congress that Democrats control just narrowly.

In a further complication, several pro-immigration groups said they would press Biden to go even further and take steps such as an immediate moratorium on deportations, detentions and new arrests. Their demands indicated the pressures Biden would face from his party’s liberal wing as four years of President Donald Trump’s restrictive and often harsh immigration policies come to an end.

“It simply wouldn’t have happened without us,” Lorella Praeli, co-president of the liberal group Community Change, said of Biden’s victory. “So we are now in a powerful position.”

Biden plans to introduce the legislation shortly after being inaugurated today, a move he hopes will spotlight his emphasis on an issue that’s defied major progress in Congress since 1986.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he was studying Biden’s proposal and “I look forward to working together with him” — a choice of words that might suggest changes could be needed for it to pass Congress.

Biden’s proposal would create an eight-year pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants, set up a processing program abroad for refugees seeking admission to the U.S. and push toward using technology to monitor the border. The measure was described by an official from Biden’s transition team who described the plan on condition of anonymity.

With an eye toward discouraging a surge of immigrants toward the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the package’s route to citizenship would only apply to people already in the U.S. by this past Jan. 1. But it omits the traditional trade-off of dramatically enhanced border security that’s helped attract some GOP support in the past.