This past week, the President and a bipartisan group of Senators released proposals reflecting their principles for comprehensive immigration reform. While the Asian Law Caucus welcomes both proposals' call for a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, the proposals also include heavy-handed enforcement measures that threaten the very immigrant communities that immigration reform is intended to benefit.
The Asian Law Caucus has analyzed the President's proposal and the Senate's framework for immigration reform and redlined our concerns directly onto the documents. We invite you to share them widely.
Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education (ASPIRE), the nation's first pan-Asian undocumented immigrant youth organization, has also shared a statement, below.
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We Deserve Better: Immigration Proposals Fall Short of Reform
ASPIRE, the nation's first undocumented Asian Pacific youth organization, releases a
response to immigration proposals
After months of speculation, the Senate's bipartisan "Gang of 8" released their framework for comprehensive immigration reform yesterday. Their proposal recognizes the need to include a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. However, the plan is contingent upon enforcement-first practices. While President Obama captured the sentiment that this debate should be about people, not policies, his "common-sense" immigration reform proposal also falls short of an overhaul to fix the broken immigration system.
Enforcement provisions and further militarization of our borders will not solve the problems of our future. Instead, these practices will unfairly target immigrant populations and increase the inhumane treatment of immigrants. In addition, surveillance and the mandatory implementation of the E-Verify system would undoubtedly violate the privacy of citizens and non-citizens alike. If we want to move forward with immigration reform, we cannot continue to criminalize and marginalize immigrant workers.
Clearly the reforms of the past have failed us, often taking one step forward and several steps back. America has witnessed citizenship programs of the past that came with the cost of harsh penalties for immigrant workers and their employers, increased border enforcement, which all proved to be only temporary solutions. Since then, the number of undocumented immigrants nearly quadrupled and the number of people being killed at the border has increased at an alarmingly high rate. History should not repeat itself.
Furthermore, the proposed legalization process is unreasonable. Their process favors "individuals who entered the United States as minor children" and farmworkers, but requires other immigrants to wait at the back of the"line". Wait times and probationary periods would create additional backlogs. A fair and just immigration reform policy would be inclusive of all 11 million aspiring Americans.
We demand a pathway to citizenship for everyone in our community; not just the highly skilled and DREAM Act eligible students, but for everyone regardless of their race, age, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, criminal background history, education, English proficiency, culture, or national origin.
While the immigration debate continues, we continue to face reckless detentions and deportations within our community. We cannot stand by idly as families are being torn apart. We urge Congress and the Obama Administration to grant an immediate moratorium on deportations. (Photo credit: Natalie Gee)
