Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Immigration Roundup: IRCA or Not IRCA? That Is the Question

by Laura D. Francis

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After five long markup sessions, the Senate Judiciary Committee May 21 sent the “gang of eight’s” comprehensive immigration overhaul bill (S. 744) to the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised floor debate beginning soon after senators return from the Memorial Day recess, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he will not block the bill from floor consideration. The momentum continues.

But House Republicans are saying not so fast.

At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee May 22, Republicans expressed concern that S. 744 will make the same mistakes as the last law that, like the current legislation, was supposed to solve the country’s immigration problems once and for all: the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. IRCA is widely blamed as a chief cause of the influx of undocumented immigrants into the country, now at an estimated 11 million people.

Republican committee members mostly pointed to S. 744’s border security “triggers” for allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for registered provisional immigration (RPI) status and eventually green cards. Under the bill, the Department of Homeland Security only would have to present plans for securing the border—rather than demonstrating that the border actually is secure—before the RPI process could begin. After that, DHS only would have to show “substantial” completion of the plans before RPI immigrants could apply for green cards.

Not securing the border before granting “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants will result in a new wave of undocumented immigrants, House Republicans argued.

But Democratic committee members and some witnesses instead claimed IRCA’s main flaws were a lack of interior enforcement—in particular against employers of undocumented immigrants—and the law’s failure to set up a workable system for immigrants to come into the country legally. They also pointed out that, with thousands of additional border patrol agents and vast improvements to technology, the border is more secure now than ever before.

Whether or not S. 744 is akin to IRCA, House Republicans are plowing ahead with their preferred approach of piecemeal immigration legislation, making the future of S. 744—if it passes the Senate—uncertain.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) May 23 signed on to his third piece of legislation since he announced his preferred “step-by-step approach” in April. He and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced the proposed Supplying Knowledge-Based Immigrants and Lifting Levels of STEM Visas Act (SKILLS Visa Act) (H.R. 2131), which would allocate 55,000 green cards to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges and universities with a Ph.D. in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field and would up the H-1B highly skilled guestworker visa cap to 155,000.

Goodlatte previously was the chief sponsor or original co-sponsor of bills to make the E-Verify electronic employment eligibility verification system mandatory for all U.S. employers within two years of passage (H.R. 1772) and a bill to revamp the agricultural guestworker program (H.R. 1773).

In Other News:

• A federal judge in Arizona May 16 ruled that the state likely is violating the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by denying driver’s licenses to deferred action for childhood arrivals beneficiaries who present employment authorization documents as proof of their lawful presence, but accepting EADs from other deferred action beneficiaries. However, the plaintiffs did not prove a sufficient threat of irreparable harm to justify a preliminary injunction.

• A federal court in Washington state May 7 granted preliminary approval to a settlement that will change how the government calculates the “asylum clock”—the 180-day waiting period before asylum seekers can apply for work authorization. Under the settlement, which is still subject to a fairness hearing, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review have agreed to change how they determine when the clock starts and stops and to provide additional notice to asylum seekers as to how their own actions affect the clock.

• Although mandatory E-Verify has support from both political parties in the House and Senate, small business owners and their representatives expressed concern at a Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee roundtable May 16 that the system could wreak havoc on their companies, especially those with five or fewer employees. Concerns included the time it takes to resolve a tentative nonconfirmation, the system’s accuracy rate, and small businesses’ ability to use the system if they do not have internet access.

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