There really is a group for everything.
My research on couples whose relationships are stymied by immigration policy has led me to the group American Families United. The volunteer group wants three specific changes to immigration law, each of which is addressed by the most recent draft comprehensive reform bill in the House and theoretically supported by Sentate Democrats. I’ll get to those in a minute.
But first, in another convergence, President Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday on immigration reform that was uninspired, but did employ some new language that hints at the logic behind my book.
With Obama speeches, I usually listen while doing something else, waiting for him to draw me in. But Thursday’s speech at American University never drew me in … it was all cliche and cheese. But two points did stand out for me.
First, Obama acknowledged that families are indeed frequently separated by immigration policy, even when they haven’t broken any laws. While this point seems to be an aside for the administration, it is something that most Americans don’t understand: just because you marry American does not automatically grant you citizenship.
“Indeed, after years of patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions, the legal immigration system is as broken as the borders. Backlogs and bureaucracy means the process can take years. While an applicant waits for approval, he or she is often forbidden from visiting the United States — which means even husbands and wives may be forced to spend many years apart. High fees and the need for lawyers may exclude worthy applicants.”
Then Obama addressed the family plight of people here illegally, arguing that deporting 11 million people was not rational:
“Such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive. Moreover, it would tear at the very fabric of this nation — because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric. Many have children who are American citizens. Some are children themselves, brought here by their parents at a very young age, growing up as American kids, only to discover their illegal status when they apply for college or a job.”
That line about immigrants here illegally being woven into the fabric of the nation is a powerful line, and one that I will explore in my book. The relationships I’m discovering link American citizens to people that are here illegally in very deep ways.
And this group American Families United has been dealing with those relationships since the last (failed) round of immigration reform in 2006. I spoke briefly with Paul Donnelly, the press contact for the group and a former staffer for the U.S. Commission for Immigration Reform in the late 1990s and he said there is a goldmine of family separation stories out there.
The group has three concrete goals: to stop the deportation of the stepchildren of Americans, to reform waivers given when a person here illegally marries an American citizen so that they are less arbitrary and to plug a loophole whereby temporary workers can bring their families to the U.S. but once they apply for citizenship, their families are not permitted to remain in the country because of quotas. (I think I’ve got that right, but I need to research it a bit more).
Most of those provisions are in the Comprehensive Immigration Reform ASAP Act, the most recent immigration bill before Congress. It’s sponsored by Rep. Solomon Ortiz of Texas and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and contains many of the provisions outlined by Senate Democrats in April. But conventional wisdom, repeated again and again in recent press clippings, is that there will be no immigration reform before November, and maybe none before 2011.
I’m okay with that because it gives me more time to get the book done, but many people are not okay with that. Some immigration advocacy groups are now calling for piecemeal immigration reform, starting with the DREAM Act, which lets undocumented students attend college in the United States without punishment, and eventually normalize their status. The administration is aware of this call for non-comprehensive reform, but Obama director of intergovernmental affairs, Cecilia Muñoz, the highest ranking Latina White House official, made the point that they need the same votes for the DREAM Act as for the whole package.
What is the risk in reframing the entire border debate in terms of family values? Health and safety, security of children, family reunification both here and in source countries … these are all huge issues that, in my experience, resonate with people more readily than workforce numbers, border militarization and crime and punishment.
