Pro-immigrant organizations and some Democrats are pushing for measures that will shift the party to the right on immigration as President-elect Donald Trump gets ready to take office and implement what he has vowed will be the greatest deportation effort in American history. According to the move some are supporting, there would be an effort to reduce the amount of individuals entering the nation while also supporting the reworking of legal immigration paths based on humanitarian aid and economic needs.
Similar concepts were put out by Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of El Paso, Texas, and her Republican colleague, Representative Maria Salazar of Florida, in a 2023 bill called the Dignity Act. In addition to providing $25 billion for border security and requiring all employers of a specific size to join the E-Verify program to verify that workers are permitted to work in the United States, the bill would have given Dreamers a path to citizenship and enhanced visa programs to fill important positions in the American economy, like farming and healthcare.
Even though Trump has promised to crack down on immigrants, Escobar says she has reason to expect that some of those ideas may be implemented this Congress, even if the bill was never taken to the House for a vote.
Escobar pointed out that in order to fulfill his campaign pledges, Trump will probably need to take legislative action on immigration.
She told NBC News that they would probably have to cooperate with Democrats if they wanted to amend the law. In the House, where the margin is so narrow, that is particularly true.
“No amount of demonizing immigrants will change the fact that we still need immigration reform and that we need immigrants in this country,” Escobar stated. Our population is getting older. The size of families has decreased over time. All skill levels of immigrants are needed.
However, some Senate and House Democrats are hesitant to enter the discussion until they have a better idea of what Trump’s plans are for deportations. For that reason, several refused to be interviewed for this story.
During the first Trump administration, Democrats provided opposition to Trump’s strict immigration policies, which included deporting immigrants back to their home countries, separating children from their parents, and making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico. They were less inclined to discuss stepping up border security to restrict who may apply for asylum at the southern border and more inclined to support the protection of asylum-seekers.
However, some Democrats have altered their approach in response to Trump’s second triumph.
In part, the change started during the campaign when Trump attacked the border policy of President Joe Biden. Democrats mostly agreed to measures that would have strengthened border security in a bipartisan immigration deal that was ultimately squelched when pro-Trump members refused to bring it to a vote in the House. Some are now hopeful that some of the concepts from that bipartisan package, along with Escobar and Salazar’s Dignity Act, may find a second home as Trump gets ready to take office.
A plan unveiled Wednesday by FWD.us, a well-known pro-immigration group led by David Plouffe, the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign manager who most recently served as a senior adviser to the Harris-Walz campaign, incorporates and expands upon many of the concepts from the Dignity Act.
Andrea Flores, a former Biden administration official and former President Barack Obama official, wrote the idea.
Flores, who is currently the vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us, argued that we need to broaden the scope of the present policy debate, learn from the past ten years of policies that did not manage mass migration, and cultivate political support for a more successful set of solutions.
The strategy aims to address the Biden administration’s inability to handle the border’s overwhelming numbers, which Flores attributes to the Obama administration’s 2014 spike in the number of individuals seeking asylum at the border. Flores also highlights how several governments, including the first Trump administration, have relied too heavily on Mexico and other Western Hemisphere nations to halt the migration of people to the southern border.
A Biden administration program that permitted 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to seek to live and work in the United States for a maximum of two years with the assistance of a U.S.-based sponsor is the foundation for one of the paper’s most comprehensive suggestions.
Over 800,000 migrants have been brought in via the scheme, but as NBC News previously reported, there have been issues with potential sponsor fraud.
Similar to Escobar’s bill, Flores stated in the policy proposal that a better legal pathways plan will enable the United States to more effectively choose migrants who meet the requirements for asylum or who would be able to meet a particular economic need. Additionally, she maintained that the program ought to permit migrants to remain for more than two years.
The bulk of beneficiaries will nonetheless eventually apply for asylum and join the years-long backlog because the Biden policy is only temporary, she noted.
In an interview with NBC News, Flores stated that while Trump’s plan for mass deportations does not address border security issues, she thinks Democrats can now advocate for new policies that lower border flow.
She went on to say that Democrats should respond to the border security argument instead of concentrating only on immigrants who are already in the country, such as Dreamers, and their potential road to citizenship.
Saying that removing what must be a huge number of Mexican nationals will have any deterrent effect on Mexican numbers—which are not the real problem at the border—is completely unrelated and unsupported by data, according to Flores. The border is currently the focus of our immigration policies, so it’s critical that Democrats have a well-thought-out response to that question.
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