Charlotte Jones Carroll, Immigration Action Team Convenor (cjonescarroll@aol.com)

April brought concerns about the lack of progress on two important immigration goals: creating legal paths to citizenship and raising the cap for incoming refugees.    

Success for President Biden’s comprehensive immigration reform bill appears doubtful as the legislation remains stalled in House and Senate committees. Advocates are instead urging action on bills in the Senate, that have already passed the House. This includes HR6, the House’s American Dream and Promise Act. In the Senate, the measure is divided into S306, the SECURE Act, providing pathways to legal status for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders; and S264, the DREAM Act for Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and other Dreamers.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act (HR1603) also passed the House. If approved by the Senate, it will provide immigrants with more options to work here legally and add protection from worker exploitation. Still, this bill falls short of farmworker goals. 

The Citizenship for Essential Workers Act (HR1909 and S747) has been introduced in the House and Senate but has yet to come to the floor in either chamber. Instead, immigration advocates are pushing to include the bill’s provisions – allowing pathways to citizenship for all 5 million immigrant workers in essential frontline jobs — in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which addresses infrastructure and economic recovery. The hope is that the Biden Jobs bill could pass under the reconciliation process, which requires only a simple Senate majority. UUSJ has joined petitions and letters of partner organizations in support of these efforts, and issued Action Alerts for the DACA, TPS, and Farm Workforce bills.

Meanwhile, President Biden surprisingly seemed to walk back a promise to raise this fiscal year’s refugee resettlement cap from its historically low level of 15,000. The President appeared to hold off raising the cap based on insufficient administrative support to deal with an influx of refugees. After immigration advocates expressed immediate outrage, the White House promised to increase the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States this fiscal year, with firm numbers to be announced this month. Biden did remove the prior administration’s bans on refugees from Muslim and African countries.