President Announces Important, But Flawed, Immigration Reform Proposal

IMMIGRATION LAW & POLICY

Obtaining Lawful Permanent Residence Status

PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES IMPORTANT, BUT FLAWED, IMMIGRATION REFORM PROPOSAL
Immigrants' Rights Update, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 17, 2004

When on Jan. 7, 2004, President Bush outlined his administration's proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, he cited as reasons for it the fact that "many employers [are] turning to the illegal labor market" and that "millions of hard-working men and women are condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive, undocumented economy." However, if Congress were to enact the main elements of his proposal, the result would most likely not be the elimination of the illegal labor market nor the bringing "above ground" of the millions of undocumented workers currently employed in the United States.

As the centerpiece of his proposal, the president wants to create a new guest worker program with some of the following features:

All employed undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would be eligible for a temporary nonimmigrant visa if their employers agreed to sponsor them.
Also eligible for such a visa would be persons not already in the U.S. who had a job offer from a U.S. employer who had tried and failed to fill the position with an employment-eligible worker already in the U.S.
The new temporary nonimmigrant guest worker visa would authorize its holder to work in the U.S. for up to three years if the visa-holder remained employed, though the visa-holder would not have to be employed the entire time by the original sponsor.
The three-year guest worker visa would be renewable for an unspecified number of terms, but not indefinitely.
During their period of lawful guest worker employment, workers would be allowed to travel freely between the U.S. and their homelands.
The spouse and minor children of a guest worker would be allowed to live in the U.S. with the worker but would not be legally authorized to work in the U.S. unless they qualified to do so as guest workers themselves.
Guest workers would be eligible to apply for lawful permanent resident status, but they would have to apply through the current backlogged system and wait, along with all other applicants for permanent residence, for visas to become available (i.e., the proposal does not envision allowing guest workers to apply for any special adjustment to LPR status once their temporary guest worker visas expire).
At the end of their period of authorized stay in the U.S., the guest workers would be required to return to their countries of origin.

Other steps the president proposes as part of his immigration reform package include: o An unspecified increase in the number of permanent resident visas available each year.

Increased workplace and other enforcement of immigration laws, including the use of biometric identifiers (though the president says he is not calling for the institution of a national ID).
A requirement that employers report to the government regarding whom they have hired under the guest worker program and who has left their employment, so that the government can track such workers and deport those who have lost their employer sponsorship.
An option offered to guest workers to have their earnings placed into "preferred tax" accounts that could be drawn down in their countries of origin.
The negotiation with other countries of social security "totalization agreements" that permit pooling of social security earnings from both the U.S. and the foreign country so that, when they return home, workers from that country are not penalized (in terms of receiving social security benefits) for the time they have spent working abroad.

Despite such enticements intended to encourage immigrants to work legally, critics of the president's proposal doubt that undocumented immigrants are likely to make themselves known to immigration authorities in return for an unknown period of work authorization culminating in a forced return to their countries of origin. Unless they are offered a program that eventually leads to the possibility of becoming U.S. citizens, undocumented people who have much invested in their Stateside life are unlikely to come forward.

Other major flaws in the president's proposal include:

The fact that a guest worker program made up of millions of relatively low-wage and highly mobile guest workers would be a bureaucratic nightmare to administer.
The problems of abuse and misuse inherent in guest worker programs, since participants face deportation if they are laid off or fired, which leaves them vulnerable to unscrupulous employers.
The problems of abuse and misuse of workers that historically have cropped up whenever immigration enforcement has focused on the workplace.

A more thorough analysis of the president's proposal is currently available under "Latest News" on the first page of NILC's website, at www.nilc.org.