America’s immigration impasse is self-inflicted. It doesn’t have to be

Analysis: Amid debates over the border, “Dreamers” and sweeping immigration bills, experts say politics ignores the obvious: Immigration laws must continually be adjusted, reformed and revised.

America’s immigration impasse — an endless loop across different administrations — is largely self-inflicted, because Congress has repeatedly failed to acknowledge one simple thing: Immigration happens.

Accordingly, immigration laws must be continually adjusted, reformed and revised, experts say.

“People will always want to come to the U.S., and the U.S. will always need people,” said former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who was a top immigration adviser to President George W. Bush.

Until there is a system that allows enough legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs, there will be illegal immigration, Gutierrez said.

“That’s just part of how our economy is set up. It’s part of demographics,” Gutierrez said. “Our birthrate is not high enough to be able to fill the needs of our economy.” 

The coronavirus pandemic reinforced the importance of immigrant labor to the American economy, including labor by the undocumented.

It opened many Americans’ eyes to the precariousness of the U.S. food supply, which depends on immigrant and undocumented farmworkers and meat plant workers, as well as to other immigrants’ roles as essential workers, such as home health care aides, nurses and paramedics.

All of those people and many other immigrants, including young immigrants — often called “Dreamers” based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — will play a key role in helping the economy recover from its pandemic bust.

But immigration requires periodic calibration, and the economics and the changing patterns are lost in the politics.

“People are going to move — as they are all around the world — where they think they can find places to better feed their children. That’s the bottom line, and that’s the history of migration to the United States,” said Luis Fraga, director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Another generation in legal limbo

The Biden administration is grappling with how to process and house children and teens crossing the border. Many minors have cited a simple reason for coming — to reunite with a parent who’s already here, part of a previous migration.

Meanwhile, millions of “Dreamer” young adults have spent most of their lives in the U.S., having immigrated as children but lacking legal status. Most immigrant farmworkers, who make up a large and essential part of the workforce, don’t have the protection of work permits or green cards.

The House passed two bills to give “Dreamers” and farmers a path to legalization, but Senate Republicans have pretty much said it’s dead on arrival — they want a sweeping immigration bill that also tackles border enforcement.

The immigration impasse has lasted long enough for multiple generations of young immigrants to have come of age here and moved into adult lives of limbo, stagnating their economic mobility, along with their communities’.

In 2013, President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a stopgap fix after years of congressional refusal to legalize immigrants who had been here since they were young children but lacked legal status.

Immigrants with DACA protection still face possible removal from the country, as the Trump administration threatened, but they have two-year intervals of stays of deportation and permits to work. Many states grant other benefits, such as driver’s licenses and in-state college tuition rates in their home states.

The first measure to legalize young immigrants was introduced in 2001 as the DREAM Act. Passage of the legislation or something like it happened so many times that it spawned the moniker “Dreamers,” just as those who have benefited from Obama’s DACA program use “Dacamented” to refer to the quasi-legal status they are in.

The House-passed bill facing opposition in the Senate would deal with some of the mostly young 4 million of the 11 million undocumented people in the country, significantly boosting their economic prospects while closing a chapter in the long immigration impasse.

The majority of the undocumented population is Latino, and the population is young — which means it’s a significant part of the current and future American workforces.

Revive a past immigration tool?

Although the current bills are an important step, they should be seen as part of a continuous process, experts said.

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act made it possible for 3 million people to become legal residents. But contrary to some thinking at the time, it didn’t end the issue of illegal immigration — an example of the perils of relying on the one-time-only approach.

Immigration laws must be “constantly reviewed,” “nimble” and sensitive to new developments, Fraga said.

A regular legalization tool, known as the registry date, already exists in immigration law. In 1929, the law set the first date at June 3, 1921, and immigrants who could show that they had been continually in the U.S. since then could apply for legal residence. 

The date was updated over the decades, and it was last adjusted so that anyone in the country before Jan. 1, 1972, was eligible to apply for legal permanent residency.