Roughly 2.5 million undocumented immigrants to benefit

WASHINGTON (TIP) : The Democratic-led House voted on Thursday, March 18, to create a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, reopening a politically fraught debate over the nation’s broken immigration system just as President Biden confronts a growing surge of migrants at the border, says a New York Times report filed byNicholas Fandos. In a near party-line vote of 228 to 197, with just nine Republicans joining Democrats, the House moved to set up a permanent legal pathway for roughly 2.5 million undocumented immigrants, including those brought to the United States as children — known as Dreamers — and those granted Temporary Protected Status for humanitarian reasons. They were expected to approve a second measure later, with more bipartisan backing, that would grant legal status to close to a million farmworkers and their families while updating a key agricultural visa program. The votes were significant milestones for the Dreamers and other activists who have waged a decade-long campaign, often at great personal risk, to bring the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States without permanent legal status out of the shadows. Dreamers, those who have T.P.S. and agricultural workers have in many cases lived in the United States for long periods, and measures to normalize their status have broad public support. In moving swiftly to consider both bills, House leaders wagered that singling out relatively narrow but publicly popular immigration fixes could shake up a deadlocked policy debate after years of failed attempts at more comprehensive immigration legislation, and deliver for a key constituency. “This House has another chance to pass H.R. 6 and once and for all end the fear and uncertainty that have plagued the life of America’s Dreamers, who have become an integral part of the fabric of American society,” Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California and an author of the Dreamer bill, said during a hard-fought debate inside the Capitol. “It is an issue about who we are as Americans.”

But after colliding with a wave of hardened Republican opposition in the House, the bills face steep odds in the evenly divided Senate. While some Republicans there have pledged support for Dreamers in the past, their party is increasingly uniting behind a hardline strategy to block any new immigration law as it seeks to use the worsening situation at the border as a political cudgel against Mr. Biden and Democrats.

“There is no pathway for anything right now,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a key player in past bipartisan immigration pushes, said this week.

That means the immigration measures will join a growing pile of liberal agenda items, as well as broadly supported measures on pressing national challenges, that have passed the House but are destined to languish or die because of Republican opposition in the Senate. They include a landmark expansion of voting rights, new gun control measures, the most significant pro-labor legislation in decades and the Equality Act for L.G.B.T.Q. people.

Democrats in favor of eliminating or altering the filibuster believe the accumulating pressure could help break the dam in the months ahead, allowing them to change Senate rules to do away with the 60-vote requirement and let legislation pass with a simple majority.

(Agencies)