US House passes bill that would give Dreamers a
path to citizenship
Measure, which aims to undo Trump’s hardline
immigration policies, is likely to hit a wall in the evenly divided Senate
Maanvi
Singh and agencies
@maanvissingh
Fri 19 Mar
2021 01.34 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/18/us-house-immigration-bill-dreamers-citizenship
The US
House of Representatives has passed a bill that would give undocumented
immigrants, including “Dreamers”, a pathway to citizenship.
The House
on Thursday voted 228 to 197, largely along party lines, to set up a legal
pathway to citizenship for Dreamers – people who came to the US as undocumented
minors and who received temporary protections under the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.
The bill,
called the American Dream and Promise Act of 2021, would also grant green cards
for many immigrants who have fled war or natural disasters and are residing in
the US with a temporary protected status. In all, it could make 4.4 million
people eligible for permanent residence in the US, according to the Migration
Policy Institute.
Nine
Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.
Representatives
also voted 247-174 Thursday on a second bill, which would grant legal status
for undocumented farmworkers. Both measures passed in 2019, as well, with some
Republican support – but the measures are likely to join a growing list of
legislation that will hit a wall in the evenly divided Senate, where
Republicans have vowed to block proposals with the filibuster.
The
measures are among several attempts by Democrats to reverse Donald Trump’s
hardline immigration policies. They also coincide with Joe Biden’s efforts to
address the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, many of whom
are fleeing dangerous conditions in Central America.
The Dreamer
bill would grant conditional legal status for 10 years to many undocumented
immigrants who were brought into the US as children.
During
Thursday’s debate, the Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal noted she had
come from India to the US alone at the age of 16, saying: “Let’s stop the
hypocrisy of criminalizing immigrants.”
Immigrant
rights groups celebrated the news of its passage. “This is a result of years of
organizing and pressure from the immigrant rights movement, but we’ll continue
to hold our celebration until the very end,” tweeted the advocacy group Raices.
As president,
Trump rescinded the Obama-era Daca program, which offered temporary protection
from deportation to Dreamers. However, the supreme court ruled in 2020 that
Trump’s move had been unlawful.
The Biden
White House backed both bills. But it also urged lawmakers to adopt broader
reforms in Biden’s sweeping immigration bill introduced last month, saying this
would secure the border and “address the root causes of instability and unsafe
conditions causing migration from Central America”.
“We can’t
keep waiting,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “I urge Congress to come together to
find long term solutions to our entire immigration system so we can create a
safe, orderly, and humane immigration system, tackle the root causes of
migration and legalize the undocumented population in the United States.”
Biden’s
wide-ranging plan would provide a path to US citizenship to the 11 million
immigrants in the country illegally. But the Senate’s No 2 Democrat, Dick
Durbin, said this week that goal does not have enough support in the House or
Senate.
The Senate
Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, panned the House efforts on Thursday,
saying they would exacerbate problems at the border, further dimming prospects
in that chamber, where a supermajority of at least 60 of 100 members are needed
for most legislation to advance.
And even if
the Dreamers bill were to pass the Senate, it would still have limitations,
including provisions around criminal history that could bar some young
immigrants from legal status if they have committed a misdemeanor. It also
gives the Department of Homeland Security discretion over which youths can be
excluded from the path to citizenship, based on alleged gang affiliation or
dispositions in juvenile court.
Human
Rights Watch and other groups have written to Democratic legislators asking
them to strike provisions that would bar young immigrants who have been
criminalized from becoming citizens.
“If we
learned anything in 2020, it’s that the policing and mass incarceration systems
in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people,” said
Jacinta González, the senior campaign organizer for the advocacy group Mijente,
who criticised the bill for being “designed to strip access to Biden’s promise
of immigration reform from people who have experienced police contact.
Criminalization born of a racist system cannot be the measure by which we
determine who belongs and who goes.”
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