Transcript: Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Jordan Fabian, January 28, 2013    abcnews.go.com

From Senators Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Robert Menendez, Marco Rubio, Michael Bennet, and Jeff Flake

Introduction:

We recognize that our immigration system is broken. And while border security has improved significantly over the last two Administrations, we still don't have a functioning immigration system. This has created a situation where up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are living in the shadows. Our legislation acknowledges these realities by finally committing the resources needed to secure the border, modernize and streamline our current legal immigration system, while creating a tough but fair legalization program for individuals who are currently here. We will ensure that this is a successful permanent reform to our immigration system that will not need to be revisited.

Four Basic Legislative Pillars:

1. Create a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required;

2. Reform our legal immigration system to better recognize the importance of characteristics that will help build the American economy and strengthen American families;

3. Create an effective employment verification system that will prevent identity theft and end the hiring of future unauthorized workers; and,

4. Establish an improved process for admitting future workers to serve our nation's workforce needs, while simultaneously protecting all workers.

1. Creating a Path to Citizenship for Unauthorized Immigrants Already Here that is Contingent Upon Securing the Border and Combating Visa Overstays

- Our legislation will provide a tough, fair, and practical roadmap to address the status of unauthorized immigrants in the United States that is contingent upon our success in securing our borders and addressing visa overstays.

- To fulfill the basic governmental function of securing our borders, we will continue the increased efforts of the Border Patrol by providing them with the latest technology, infrastructure, and personnel needed to prevent, detect, and apprehend every unauthorized entrant.

- Additionally, our legislation will increase the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment, improve radio interoperability and increase the number of agents at and between ports of entry. The purpose is to substantially lower the number of successful illegal border crossings while continuing to facilitate commerce.

- We will strengthen prohibitions against racial profiling and inappropriate use of force, enhance the training of border patrol agents, increase oversight, and create a mechanism to ensure a meaningful opportunity for border communities to share input, including critiques.

- Our legislation will require the completion of an entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.

- We recognize that Americans living along the Southwest border are key to recognizing and understanding when the border is truly secure. Our legislation will create a commission comprised of governors, attorneys general, and community leaders living along the Southwest border to monitor the progress of securing our border and to make a recommendation regarding when the bill's security measures outlined in the legislation are completed.

- While these security measures are being put into place, we will simultaneously require those who came or remained in the United States without our permission to register with the government. This will include passing a background check and settling their debt to society by paying a fine and back taxes, in order to earn probationary legal status, which will allow them to live and work legally in the United States. Individuals with a serious criminal background or others who pose a threat to our national security will be ineligible for legal status and subject to deportation. Illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes face immediate deportation.

- We will demonstrate our commitment to securing our borders and combating visa overstays by requiring our proposed enforcement measures be complete before any immigrant on probationary status can earn a green card.

- Current restrictions preventing non-immigrants from accessing federal public benefits will also apply to lawful probationary immigrants.

- Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants, pass an additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work in the United States, and current employment, among other requirements, in order to earn the opportunity to apply for lawful permanent residency. Those individuals who successfully complete these requirements can eventually earn a green card.

- Individuals who are present without lawful status - not including people within the two categories identified below - will only receive a green card after every individual who is already waiting in line for a green card, at the time this legislation is enacted, has received their green card. Our purpose is to ensure that no one who has violated America's immigration laws will receive preferential treatment as they relate to those individuals who have complied with the law.

- Our legislation also recognizes that the circumstances and the conduct of people without lawful status are not the same, and cannot be addressed identically.

For instance, individuals who entered the United States as minor children did not knowingly choose to violate any immigration laws. Consequently, under our proposal these individuals will not face the same requirements as other individuals in order to earn a path to citizenship.

Similarly, individuals who have been working without legal status in the United States agricultural industry have been performing very important and difficult work to maintain America's food supply while earning subsistence wages. Due to the utmost importance in our nation maintaining the safety of its food supply, agricultural workers who commit to the long term stability of our nation's agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population because of the role they play in ensuring that Americans have safe and secure agricultural products to sell and consume. These individuals will earn a path to citizenship through a different process under our new agricultural worker program.

2. Improving our Legal Immigration System and Attracting the World's Best and Brightest

- The development of a rational legal immigration system is essential to ensuring America's future economic prosperity. Our failure to act is perpetuating a broken system which sadly discourages the world's best and brightest citizens from coming to the United States and remaining in our country to contribute to our economy. This failure makes a legal path to entry in the United States insurmountably difficult for well-meaning immigrants. This unarguably discourages innovation and economic growth. It has also created substantial visa backlogs which force families to live apart, which incentivizes illegal immigration.

- Our new immigration system must be more focused on recognizing the important characteristics which will help build the American economy and strengthen American families. Additionally, we must reduce backlogs in the family and employment visa categories so that future immigrants view our future legal immigration system as the exclusive means for entry into the United States.

- The United States must do a better job of attracting and keeping the world's best and brightest. As such, our immigration proposal will award a green card to immigrants who have received a PhD or Master's degree in science, technology, engineering, or math from an American university. It makes no sense to educate the world's future innovators and entrepreneurs only to ultimately force them to leave our country at the moment they are most able to contribute to our economy.

3. Strong Employment Verification

- We recognize that undocumented immigrants come to the United States almost exclusively for jobs. As such, dramatically reducing future illegal immigration can only be achieved by developing a tough, fair, effective and mandatory employment verification system. An employment verification system must hold employers accountable for knowingly hiring undocumented workers and make it more difficult for unauthorized immigrants to falsify documents to obtain employment. Employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers must face stiff fines and criminal penalties for egregious offenses.

- We believe the federal government must provide U.S. employers with a fast and reliable method to confirm whether new hires are legally authorized to work in the United States. This is essential to ensure the effective enforcement of immigration laws.

- Our proposal will create an effective employment verification system which prevents identity theft and ends the hiring of future unauthorized workers. We believe requiring prospective workers to demonstrate both legal status and identity, through non-forgeable electronic means prior to obtaining employment, is essential to an employee verification system; and,

- The employee verification system in our proposal will be crafted with procedural safeguards to protect American workers, prevent identity theft, and provide due process protections.

4. Admitting New Workers and Protecting Workers' Rights

- The overwhelming majority of the 327,000 illegal entrants apprehended by CBP in FY2011 were seeking employment in the United States. We recognize that to prevent future waves of illegal immigration a humane and effective system needs to be created for these immigrant workers to enter the country and find employment without seeking the aid of human traffickers or drug cartels.

- Our proposal will provide businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.

Our legislation would:

- Allow employers to hire immigrants if it can be demonstrated that they were unsuccessful in recruiting an American to fill an open position and the hiring of an immigrant will not displace American workers;

- Create a workable program to meet the needs of America's agricultural industry, including dairy to find agricultural workers when American workers are not available to fill open positions;

- Allow more lower-skilled immigrants to come here when our economy is creating jobs, and fewer when our economy is not creating jobs;

- Protect workers by ensuring strong labor protections; and,

- Permit workers who have succeeded in the workplace and contributed to their communities over many years to earn green cards.

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Border Out of Control?

By Fidel “Butch” Montoya

When the issue of protecting one’s home or neighborhood comes up, the first thing we say as homeowners is we should have the right to determine what we want done to protect our quality of life.

If there is one thing home owners despise, it is having outsiders telling them what they think is the best approach to dealing with any safety issues. We have heard the heated arguments and the local refrain, “We live here and we know what is best for our area.”

An article in the Texas Observer explains how border communities are finally uniting to fight militarization of the border and determine what the best policies are to secure their communities.

The main complaint residents along the border have is that they have become the victims of politicians’ hateful rhetoric bent on perpetuating the fear about undocumented immigrants.

One of the main culprits is Arizona Senator Jon Kyl who tried to get an amendment passed that would throw undocumented immigrants in jail for two weeks before deporting them back to Mexico. Kyl said this would be a deterrent to them trying again. This is just another scheme to criminalize undocumented immigrants.

According to the Observer, border communities are concerned once the Democrats realize a lot of horse trading with the GOP is going to be necessary to push immigration reform forward, “Residents are already bracing to become the sacrificial lamb for Democrats desperate for Republican buy-in on immigration reform. They're already seeing it with the 1,200 guard troops and a Predator Drone dispatched to El Paso.”

Arizona Senator John McCain is so desperate to get re-elected; he has pushed aside his personal values and political beliefs and has become one of the strongest proponents of harsher laws against undocumented immigrants.

McCain attempted to have the Senate pass an amendment sending 6,000 National Guard troops to the border. Even after losing that vote, he still managed to sneak his amendment back in a defense bill that comes up for a vote later this year.

One of the leaders of the effort to unite border communities puts the nasty debate about border safety in perspective. Louie Gilot, director of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso told the Observer, “We’ve got to separate border security from immigration reform. We need to have an independent voice for the well being of the communities and so the border isn’t sacrificed the next time immigration reform is taken up.”

Gilot went to mention she is a resident of El Paso, Texas, and according to the latest FBI crime statistics just released; El Paso has the second lowest level of violent crimes per capita among the top 25 most populated cities. In plain language, El Paso is the second safest city in the USA!

Putting those statistics in better perspective, El Paso with a population of about 612,000 residents had 4 homicides last year. Our nation’s capital, with a smaller population of about 592,000 had 66 murders last year.

Yet, the people leading the effort to unite border communities rightfully complain that the border area is often described by the news media and the politicians that rarely venture out of the belt way in D.C. as “a war zone.”

Gilot says one of the main problems is that these politicians have a misperception about the border, and so when they discuss border options, they are made from a “border perceived to be a war zone.”

In March 2010, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a press release outlining the border security initiatives.

“Over the past year, our unprecedented cooperation with the Mexican government and sustained security efforts along the border have resulted in major progress in combating the ruthless cartels that threaten the safety of both our nations.”

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has also taken a tougher enforcement approach in trying to secure the border, but has focused on capturing undocumented immigrants instead of closing the border to the drug cartels and gangs that are involved in human trafficking.

But as one reviews the press release, one has to wonder why an additional 1,200 National Guard troops are needed at the border at this time? Ordering troops to border is just another example of how political rhetoric and bad policy decisions are meant only to exploit the politics of immigration reform, and create more fear and hate.

Texas Senator John Cornyn perhaps best exemplifies how the fear sound bite works to stall any efforts to move immigration reform forward by exploiting the issue of the border. "Until we deal with this broken border, we are not going to be able to deal with other aspects of our broken immigration system."

If the border is still considered “a war zone,” by the politicians back in Washington, D.C., we need to demand answers from them why all of the border initiatives Napolitano claims have made it safer are not working.

The DHS press release touts the facts about border improvements that are simply hard to rationalize. “Since last March, DHS has doubled the number of personnel assigned to Border Enforcement Security Task Forces; tripled the number of ICE intelligence analysts working along the U.S.-Mexico border; quadrupled deployments of Border Liaison Officers; and begun screening 100 percent of southbound rail shipments for illegal weapons, drugs and cash—for the first time ever.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Doubled the number of personnel assigned to Border Enforcement Security Task Forces. Tripled the number of ICE intelligence analysts working along the U.S.-Mexico border. DHS quadrupled deployment of Border Liaison Officers.

Most startling to me is the fact that for the very first time ever, the U.S. government has “begun screening 100 percent of southbound rail shipments for illegal weapons, drugs and cash - For the very first time ever!”

This means that for years, our government simply ignored the fact that shipments of weapons, drugs and cash were probably being shipped across the border without any threat of government intervention. Outrageous if you ask me!

The Border Patrol in its 85 year history has doubled its agents from 10,000 in 2004 to over than 20,000 agents in 2009.

A question that must be asked is that if the Department of Homeland Security is accomplishing all of these goals and making the border safer, why it is even necessary to talk about the border as “a war zone?” Why is Senator McCain still talking about adding 6,000 more National Guard troops to militarize the border?

It is time that the President along with his Department of Homeland Security and every elected politician in D.C. stop viewing the border as “a war zone” and need to demand accountability of all the high priced technology and border personnel being sent to the border.

It is also time to listen to the people living along the border who know better than anyone else what is actually happening at the border and stop this rhetoric of fear and panic the politicians use to politicize the immigration reform movement.

Lobbying for more troops on the border, Arizona Senator John McCain said, "The borders are broken. We have an obligation to our citizens to secure our border and allow them to lead lives where they not live in fear."

If anyone knows what border policies may actually allow residents to lead their lives where they are not living in fear, it is the residents who live on the border.

So why aren’t our politicians and President listening to these people? Militarizing our borders is bad public policy. We must stop paying attention to news media reports, politicians, and opinion pundits that claim the border is out of control.

For once, why don’t we let the people most affected by the impractical border initiatives from uninformed politicians in the DC beltway have a say in what is best for their communities?

El Semanario  http://www.elsemanario.net/

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Fidel "Butch" Montoya is Director of H. S. Power and Light Ministries - Latino Faith Initiative. He was the Vice President/News Director of KUSA - TV Channel 9 News from 1985-1990, and worked at the news station for 24 years. Montoya also served as Deputy Mayor of City and County of Denver from 1995-1999; as the Manager of Public Safety for the City and County of Denver from 1994-2000. Montoya was Licensed to preach in 1972. He serves on the Executive Council of the Hispanic Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

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