President Obama Leads Immigration Reform Debate

Washington, D.C. On June 25, 2009 the President, Vice President, and key cabinet members met with a bipartisan group of Senate and House leaders representing the spectrum of opinion on immigration. The White House characterized the meeting as the “launch” of a policy conversation and “an honest discussion about the issues…identifying areas of agreement and areas where we still have work to do, with the hope of beginning the debate in earnest later this year.” “But what I’m encouraged by is that after all the overheated rhetoric and the occasional demagoguery on all sides around this issue, we’ve got a responsible set of leaders sitting around the table who want to actively get something done and not put it off until a year, two years, three years, five years from now, but to start working on this thing right now,” said President Obama.

COMMENTARY

Here is a link to the video, if you would like to view and listen to President Obama’s comments.

President Obama, in this meeting stated that the immigration system is “broken” and needs “fixing.” He identified four target areas:

1. Tighten the nation’s borders
2. Crack down on employers taking advantage of immigrant workers
3. Legalize status of undocumented workers
4. Creation of a more efficient legal system

I will address each of these target areas.

1. Tighten Borders:

President Obama did not elaborate on how we would tighten the nation’s borders. The U.S. Customs and Border patrol has typically received the lion’s share of the budget allocation to our immigration system. Increasing this budget will likely create shortages on the benefits side of the immigration system, which has been the pattern in the past.

2. Employer Crackdowns:

No elaboration from President Obama on this. My prediction is that employers who petition for an employee can expect a significantly higher percentage of audits in the future. A lot of immigration attorneys and their corporate clients are already experiencing this situation. USCIS will generate these audits for both Non-immigrant and Immigrant petitions. This is a win-win policy for the government. Cracking down on abusive employers is an honorable objective, and that pleases the voting public. Beefing up the USCIS fraud/audit division is also an employment creation system for the federal government. They have to hire more employees to generate these audits. More U.S. workers with full time jobs generally translates into successful re-election campaigns for their respective congressmen.

3. Legalize Status of Undocumented Workers:

President Obama indicated that this project will take some “Heavy Lifting.” This is the true hot-button issue here. I see this as boiling down to two basic questions:

• Will the government create another amnesty, leading to a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented workers?
• Will the government create a “guest worker” program?

I see no way for the government to pass Amnesty. This is simply not an immigrant friendly period. We are in a recession and many U.S. workers are losing their jobs every week. Most congressmen coming up for re-election are primarily concerned with preserving U.S. jobs. Any congressman backing amnesty could face a serious backlash among his constituency. I do not see enough votes to pass this issue.

Former President George W. Bush backed a similar guest worker program. The government could propose a system giving undocumented workers a temporary visa status that would grant them a work permit. With a temporary benefits program, the voting public may not feel as threatened as say a program that creates a pathway to citizenship. This program could also boost state and federal revenues on the assumption that such a guest worker might be more inclined to file income taxes. Many undocumented workers, however, already file taxes. I see some form of this program as potentially passing both houses.

4. Creation of a More Efficient Legal System:

President Obama made the following announcement: “Today I’m pleased to announce a new collaboration between my Chief Information Officer, my Chief Performance Officer, my Chief Technologies Officer and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Office to make the agency much more efficient, much more transparent, much more user-friendly than it has been in the past. In the next 90 days, USCIS will launch a vastly improved Web site that will, for the first time ever, allow applicants to get updates on their status of their applications via e-mail and text message and online.”

Given that I practice on the benefits side of the immigration system, I certainly support a more customer friendly U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. I do not see how the Administration will manage to both increase the budget for border security and also to make USCIS a more customer friendly experience. By the way, applicants have been able to get online updates on their status of their applications for several years. Perhaps it did not come in the form of receiving an email or text, but the service has existed. Applicants have been able to go to a USCIS web site and enter their case # for quite a while. It would be nice if USCIS could give more frequent updates on the case…