So what would plan B be?
“Right now the Democrats have a very small advantage,” Frank Sharry, the founder and CEO of America’s Voice, who has fought for decades for comprehensive immigration reform as proposed by President Biden, told me. “We have to be realists. The Republican Party is the party of Trump, of power, of plutocracy and of racism […] Democrats will have to go it alone if they want to bring about life-changing changes. ” Sharry believes that if approval in Congress cannot be achieved now, we must change our strategy and give a victory, even a partial one, to Latinos.
The New Washington
February 4, 2021 at 5:23 PM ET
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“We are totally committed to a path to citizenship for 11 million people,” Lorella Praeli, president of Community Change Action, who began her career as an activist for undocumented immigrants in Connecticut, wrote to me in an email. “But we are leaving behind the all or nothing strategy that did not work in the past,”
Instead, Praeli believes that the most realistic thing would be to opt for a budget reconciliation process – a complex legislative process in the Senate that allows the approval of certain expenditures and programs with a simple majority – “to legalize as many people as possible, including workers. essential, dreamers, people with temporary protection (TPS) and workers. We believe that the economic package that could be approved this spring is the best way to do it. “
This is a similar strategy to the one that culminated in 2012 with DACA, which protects some 700,000 young people from deportation and allows them to work. When the dreamers – whom their parents unauthorizedly brought to the United States as children – realized there was no support in Congress to regularize their situation, so they pressured then-President Barack Obama to protect them with an executive order that , until these days, remains in force. And his life changed radically.
A Plan B to reform immigration should seek the same thing: legalize or protect as many immigrants as possible while the necessary votes are found in Congress. It is not ideal, but it is what it is.
During this pandemic, the extraordinary value of immigrants has been demonstrated, from their contributions to science and the care of patients infected with COVID-19 to their risky cleaning and disinfection tasks. While millions of people are working remotely and sheltered in their homes, foreign farmers and workers do not stop growing the food that we all eat. And the gratitude is felt. 34 percent of Americans would like to see more immigrants in the country, not less. This is the highest support figure for more immigrants since 1965, according to Gallup.
Of course, you don’t have to give up before you start. The first option should be to try to get 60 votes in the Senate to legalize the status of around 11 million people. But if there is no support in Congress in the short term, then new ideas like Lorella Praeli and Frank Sharry have to be tried, and done in parts.
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