Congress has just two weeks to come to a consensus on how to codify protections for the Dreamers—roughly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children—before government funding runs out February 8, or risk another shutdown scenario.
But there is no clear path forward for Congress to pass such a bill.
While a number of legislative proposals exist to replace the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which will expire on March 5, the plans vary widely. The primary guidance lawmakers have from the White House consists of four goals that were agreed to in a freewheeling meeting between President Donald Trump and members of Congress earlier this month: Curtailing so-called chain migration, ending the diversity visa lottery, securing funds for the border wall, and passing a DACA replacement.
In the Senate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin has been working on a plan to replace DACA.
The proposal does not yet have legislative text, but it appears to be a compromise that would grant President Donald Trump funding for his wall on the southern border along with some other potential concessions in return for permanent legal status for immigrants currently living in the United States.
It seeks to address each of the four parameters established by the White House.
According to a summary from Graham’s office, the deal would appropriate $2.705 billion for border security improvements, with $1.6 billion of that amount dedicated specifically to construction of the border wall, as requested by the White House. (My colleague Chris Deaton explains the difference between authorizing and appropriating funds.)
It would also strike a compromise in eliminating the diversity visa lottery, reallocating half of the visas to individuals from underrepresented “priority countries” and introducing a new merit-based application selection system. The other half of the visas would go to Temporary Protected Status recipients, granting them legal status and allowing them to continue to work in the United States. Graham’s fact sheet states the latter half of annual visas initially granted to TPS recipients under the bipartisan deal would eventually be added to the merit-based priority country system, “after the TPS backlog is cleared.”
A path to permanent citizenship based on the Dream Act is included in the deal. Dreamers, including those who met the qualifications for the DACA program but never signed up, would have to wait at least 10 years as permanent lawful residents before applying to become an American citizen, and according to Graham’s office, they would probably be ineligible for welfare and other federal programs for the first five years of citizenship.
The deal would end chain migration—barring parents of Dreamers from permanent citizenship, and offer instead three-year renewable work permits.
“There are no new pathways for [parents]to obtain American citizenship,” a press release from the bipartisan group of senators asserted. Authorized permanent residents would be able to sponsor only their spouses and their children.
The White House has said the proposal doesn’t go far enough to address Trump’s concerns. GOP Senate leaders want more clarity from the White House on what version of a DACA fix would be palatable to Trump, who previously told lawmakers he would sign whatever deal they could come up with.
And some House Democrats, such as House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley, have taken issue with Graham and Durbin’s plan, arguing that a DACA replacement should not appropriate any funds for Trump’s border wall.
A more focused version of a DACA compromise that would allow recipients to obtain citizenship sooner exists separately in the House, sponsored by Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D-California).
The government shutdown over the immigration issue did boost Graham and Durbin’s efforts: Graham said after the shutdown ended Monday that the “Gang of Six” focused on hammering out a viable immigration deal had morphed into a more powerful “Gang of 60.”
If a DACA fix cannot be made in time to attach it to the next must-pass spending bill, per the deal between Senate party leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to end the shutdown, a vote on a bipartisan immigration proposal like Graham and Durbin’s would be taken in the Senate.
But even if such a bill passes the Senate on its own, it would face an uphill climb in the House.
House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t promised to take up a bipartisan immigration bill coming out of the Senate, and it seems unlikely that such a bill would be able to win enough support among his conference to carry a “majority of the majority” that would compel Ryan to bring it to the floor.
Ryan has, however, promised House Republicans a vote on a more conservative immigration bill sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte.
Goodlatte’s bill bears some similarities with the SECURE Act in the Senate, introduced in December by Sens. John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley. Called the “Securing America’s Future Act,” the House bill would allow existing DACA recipients to apply for renewable legal status that would expire every three years.
It would also end the diversity visa lottery, eliminate so-called chain migration, fund construction of Trump’s border wall, mandate employers to use E-Verify to ensure employees are legal residents, authorize the Department of Justice to withhold funding and grants for law enforcement in sanctuary cities, introduce harsher penalties for crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants, and would drastically reduce annual legal immigration levels.
Goodlatte contends the bill would reduce legal immigration by only 260,000 people annually, or 25 percent, but a more accurate analysis by the Cato Institute found it would actually cut legal immigration by 38 percent, or 420,000 people.
“I believe that it addresses the principles that we laid out and is something that we would support,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters of Goodlatte’s bill Tuesday afternoon.
The conservative plan, if it were to pass the House, would likely be dead on arrival in the Senate, where Republicans need help from their Democratic colleagues to reach a 60-vote threshold for passage.
Trump says he will release his own proposal to tackle the issue on Monday.
“This framework will fulfill the four agreed-upon pillars: securing the border and closing legal loopholes; ending extended-family chain migration; cancelling the visa lottery, and providing a permanent solution on DACA,” the White House said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “After decades of inaction by Congress, it’s time we work together to solve this issue once and for all.”
