With immigration reform being pushed off to the side by federal lawmakers, more and more voices are calling on Congress to stop making excuses and draft significant legislation on what to do for the over 11 million illegal immigrants in the US.
One of the most prominent voices is business immigration and compliance attorney Laura Foote Reiff, who co-chairs the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition – a group of business and labor associations that supports guest worker policies. Reiff believes that immigration reform will not only benefit those living in the shadows of the law but the political parties as well.
“I think we’ve come from ‘should we do immigration reform?’ to almost a chorus of Republican, Democrat and Independents that say ‘we need to do immigration reform.’ So we’ve gone over a hurdle, and that’s a big hurdle,” said Reiff. “I think now it’s just the timing of it.”
Political Distractions
Is now the right time? Not if certain lawmakers get their way. In her most recent blog post on EB-5 Insights, Reiff breaks down the political and substantive excuses on why Congressional Republicans are dragging their feet on immigration reform. One of the major reasons why no one wants to make a move is because of the upcoming midterm elections where 36 Senate seats and all 435 House seats will be on the ballot. With primary season coming up, Reiff sees that hardline Republicans are turning against the Obama Administration and its stance on immigration.
“There’s some pretty intensive primaries. Many of the Republicans are facing even further right-wing Republicans. Some of the sitting Congressmen feel like it’s going to be easier to just bash the administration and show that they’re not going to put up with what they feel are abuses in the administration. I think that is a political fear prior to the primaries that it’s just easier to lash out at this administration and say … that they don’t enforce the law,” said Reiff.
Part of the distrust in the current administration comes from President Obama and former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano overstepping Congress in 2012 to implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals process, which allows undocumented children to stay in the US if they meet certain requirements. This also added to the mistrust following the leaked Homeland Security memo on alternatives to immigration reform.
“That just makes people even more wary that the administration will enforce the law,” said Reiff. “If you’re going to make the political argument and you’re a Tea Party Republican, then you can see where they have some concerns about executive orders and the administration doing things that they think should be done through legislation.”
Reiff dismisses these concerns since the current administration deported more illegal immigrants than the Bush administration. According US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 368,644 people were deported in the 2013 fiscal year while 134,451 deportations took place in 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency.
However the focus on immigration enforcement extends beyond deportations and into how stringent employers are with identifying workers’ citizenship through E-Verify and the I-9 form.
“The argument goes that if we have enforced the immigration laws that are on the books that have been implemented in 1986, during the last major immigration overhaul, we wouldn’t have the 11 to 20 million people who have entered the country illegally,” said Reiff.
Immigration Reform Means Labor Programs
While much of the immigration debate focuses on amnesty, Reiff argues that the need for an enforceable temporary workers program is just as important because it give a legal route for people wanting jobs in the US while ending the desire to cross without papers.
“One of those primary enforcement issues is having a workable future flow program or temporary worker program. That was one of the big mistakes of 1986 – not having any type of visa program semi-skilled or lesser skilled workers. We’ve have jobs that have gone unfilled, and workers have either streamed across the border illegally or taken jobs with legitimate employers … and kind of embedded themselves in the workforce because there was no legal way for them to do it,” said Reiff.
While there have always been arguments that undocumented immigrants steal American jobs and that reform will only encourage more low-skilled workers to come to the US, Reiff sees reform as an opportunity for the business community to fill low-skilled jobs that are not as in demand from Americans while giving immigrants the chance to live openly.
“It’s taking the 11 million already here and giving them an opportunity to come out of the shadows, register, show that they are upstanding citizens, show who they really are, identify themselves and becoming legal in the US,” said Reiff.
Right now, however, Reiff admits that legislation is “way overdue.” There are three bills being currently drafted in the House, but Reiff says that they are unlikely to reach the floor until August or after the November elections.
“I hope that cooler minds will prevail and that people will start passing pieces of legislation because it’s way overdue,” said Reiff. “I think it helps both parties, and it’s good policy.”