Possible pact: Fixed immigration flow
Current levels could be maintained for 13 years
WASHINGTON — As the Senate prepares to start a freewheeling debate over immigration this week, White House officials have begun floating a possible compromise: a pledge to maintain legal immigration at current levels, about
1.1 million people a year, for more than a decade.
President Donald Trump has proposed a series of measures — including restrictions on family unification, which he calls “chain migration,” and an end to the visa lottery — that critics say could cut legal immigration to the United States by 40 percent or more.
But a White House official said Saturday that the Trump administration is working with allies in the Senate on a proposal that would create a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million people who were brought to the country illegally as children and clear the backlog of nearly 4 million sponsored relatives waiting for green cards.
The combined effort, officials said, would effectively make up for the cuts in other immigration categories for about 13 years, the official said. After that, if Congress took no additional action to add or expand visa categories, the number of people allowed to resettle in the U.S. each year probably would decline by hundreds of thousands.
The outline began emerging early last week when John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, and Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, met with a half-dozen or so Latino Republicans at the White House and said the administration was prepared to ensure that overall immigration levels would remain steady.
The shift shows the White House is feeling out the contours of a compromise as lawmakers prepare for debates on the Senate floor this week over how to protect from deportation the estimated 1.8 million people brought to the country illegally as children.
About 800,000 of them were given protection from deportation by the Obama administration under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The Trump administration ended the program in September and set a six-month cut-off date for renewal applications.
Democratic leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, have signaled privately to the White House that they are willing to negotiate Trump’s demand for $25 billion as part of a broader immigration package that would include help for the Dreamers.
The money would go into a “trust
fund” for walls or fences on the southern border, as well as other border-security purposes.
Critics are lining up. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates restricting immigration, said he would oppose a White House deal to keep legal immigration at current levels for more than a decade, calling it “a reversal” of Trump’s previous proposals.
“This argument that our economy and our success requires mass immigration is absurd,” Krikorian said.