In 2019, I joined the Global Scavenger Hunt – an around the world mystery tour where you don’t know where you are going next until they tell you to get to the airport. Vietnam, Jordan, Myanmar, Greece, Morocco, Spain, Portugal. Amazingly, everywhere we touched down I realized I was on a personal odyssey of the Jewish Diaspora, and reminded that Passover is one stop in the history of a people that has wandered the world from the time of Abraham – to escape persecution, deprivation, to seek opportunity and freedom.
We came to Egypt as climate refugees, escaping drought and famine. We fled after being enslaved for 400 years to find freedom and opportunity. It is no wonder that Jews identify with the millions of refugees around the globe, including the hundreds of thousands escaping Central America’s Northern Triangle who are escaping gang violence, crime and the ravages of climate disasters including food insecurity and habitats rendered uninhabitable and support the efforts of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS.org), founded in 1881 to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, which now helps refugees worldwide.
Immigration has again emerged as a “crisis” in this country. But like gun control and climate change, is a crisis that never stopped being a crisis and never gets addressed. Doing nothing is really about perpetuating the cruelty of a dysfunctional, broken system. The reason there are 11 million undocumented residents in this country is that there has been no mechanism to legalize them. The reason there are tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, fleeing violence and famine, living in tent cities, exposed to elements and prey for criminals, is that under the Trump Administration, cruelty rather than humanity or even international law was the “system” to deal with them.
And now, even though the numbers of migrants were building for the last nine months of the Trump administration and 75 percent of families are immediately deported, there is a crisis indeed, one that is manufactured and exploited by Republicans to undermine the Biden Administration and the Democrats when they not only didn’t care but cheered Trump’s brutality at the border.
There are solutions – there always have been.
To begin with: immigration is healthy for this nation. Indeed, as has been repeated over and over, America is a nation of immigrants – everyone who is not indigenous, is an immigrant or descended from some courageous soul who left all they knew to create a new life here. Immigrants do not bring disease and are not parasites on the economy. Just the opposite, which we have seen so dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, immigrants make up a disproportionate number of the health workers and doctors, scientists and frontline and essential workers, the food growers, processors, preparers and deliverers.
The Biden Administration has a better plan to make the immigration system function again, according to American values and recognition that immigration is an engine for economic progress:
On his first day in office, President Biden sent to Congress the US Citizenship Act of 2021, “to restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.”
Biden’s bill would:
Create a roadmap to earned citizenship for undocumented individuals and keep families together; prohibit discrimination based on religion; increase Diversity Visas to 80,000 from 55,000; grow the economy by clearing employment-based visa backlogs, reduce lengthy wait times, and eliminate per-country visa caps; make it easier for graduates of US universities with advanced STEM degrees to stay in the US; improve access to green cards for workers in lower-wage sectors; and protect workers from exploitation and improve the employment verification process.
Prioritize smart border controls with technology and infrastructure; manage the border and protect border communities; cracks down on criminal organizations.
Address the root causes of migration: codify and fund the President’s $4 billion four-year inter-agency plan to address the underlying causes of migration in the region, including increasing assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras conditioned on their ability to reduce the endemic corruption, violence, and poverty that causes people to flee their home countries; create safe and legal channels for people to seek protection, including establishing Designated Processing Centers throughout Central America to register and process displaced persons for refugee resettlement and other lawful migration avenues either to the US or partner countries.
Re-institute the Central American Minors program to reunite children with US relatives and create a Central American Family Reunification Parole Program to more quickly unite families with approved family sponsorship petitions; and improve immigration courts and protects vulnerable individuals.
Support asylum seekers and other vulnerable populations: eliminate the one-year deadline for filing asylum claims and provides funding to reduce asylum application backlogs; increases protections for U visa, T visa, and VAWA applicants and expand protections for foreign nationals assisting U.S. troops.
Biden also signed executive orders protecting DACA recipients (Dreamers) and rescinding Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban.
The House, under Democratic control, has already passed the American Dream and Promise Act which would legalize and ultimately pave the way for citizenship for Dreamers – people who were brought here as children and only know America as their homeland – and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would establish a system for agricultural workers to earn temporary status with an eventual option to become a permanent resident.
Testifying before a House panel, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the United States is on track to see the highest number of migrants on the country’s southern border than at any time in the last 20 years. The US needs to “finally fix the immigration system” and to address the root causes of migration from countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“The president is committed to restarting that critical element of an overarching approach to our border and the issues of migration that have challenged our nation for so many years,” he said.
If the Biden Administration doesn’t get immigration reform done now, he will be blamed, not the Republican Know Nothing anti-immigrant nativists who are also perversely upset at the “crisis at the border” of their own creation, and Democrats will suffer in the midterms. End the filibuster.
