BREAKING: Senate Passes Historic Immigration Reform

On Thursday afternoon, an immigration reform bill that would affect millions of undocumented immigrants was approved by a final vote of 68 to 32 in the Senate. The bill puts up to 11 million undocumented immigrants on a pathway to citizenship and enforces tough border security measures. Vice President Joe Biden presided over the historic vote, in which all the senators were required to vote from their desks. The Senate gallery was packed with exuberant DREAMers, undocumented youths who were brought to the U.S. by their parents. The gallery chanted “Yes we can” after the bill was officially passed.

After the cloture vote occurred early Thursday afternoon, politicians on both sides of the aisle spoke emotionally about the need to pass the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) teared up as he spoke of his wife’s father, who immigrated from Russia, and reflected on the letters sent to him by undocumented individuals who were brought to the U.S. as children and raised in fear of deportation. He compared present-day immigrants to all the previous waves of immigrants, notably lauding the achievements that these new Americans could contribute:

It recognizes that today’s immigrants came for the very same reason as generations before them– to achieve a dream we take for granted, the right to live in the land of the free.

Across the aisle, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) invoked his immigrant parents as he argued passionately that immigration reform will help future generations to fulfill their dreams:

Here, immigrants will give their children the life they once wanted for themselves. Here generations of unfulfilled dreams will finally come to pass. Even with all our challenges, we remain the shining city on the hill. We are still the hope of the world. And in the end, that is why I support this reform. Yes, I believe in immigrants, but I believe in America even more.

The bill now faces an uphill battle in the House, where many Republican congressmen have vowed their opposition to any kind of an immigration deal that includes a pathway to citizenship. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has promised that he would not advance a reform bill without a majority agreement by House Republicans.

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BREAKING: Senate Clears Way For Immigration Reform Bill To Pass With Broad Bipartisan Support

On Monday night, the Senate moved forward a key provision predicted to make or break its ability to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The amendment, offered by Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and John Hoeven (R-ND) and known as the “border surge” amendment, would add 20,000 border patrol agents, require the completion of 700 miles of fencing, and add 18 unmanned surveillance aircraft along the southern border. It escaped a filibuster by a vote of 67 to 27, with several Republicans joining the Democratic majority.

At a price tag of $30 billion to fund the agents alone, critics have said the amendment amounts to unnecessary spending — particularly given the fact that illegal immigration is at net zero, and the border is more secure than Republicans mandated it be in a 2007 reform effort. Still, the amendment enjoys broad support from progressives because it preserves one of the key aspects of the reform effort: a pathway to citizenship.

Shortly before the vote on Monday, the Congressional Budget Office released updated statistics on the bill given the adoption of the Corker-Hoeven amendment. It found that the amendment “would reduce the net flow of unauthorized residents to the United States relative to” the underlying bill. It also found that it would reduce the deficit slightly less than the underlying bill, given the spending required to implement the new border measures, in the first decade.

The vote on Monday night was for cloture — the ability to end debate on the amendment and move forward to voting for it. The Senate will now proceed to debate and then vote on the amendment itself. It is expected to pass.

On Wednesday, the Senate approved the amendment by a vote of 69 to 29.

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Why The GOP Can’t Afford To Kill The Immigration Bill

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Immigration reform passed the Senate on Thursday, with 14 Republicans voting in favor. Despite this bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill could easily die in the more polarized House or thereafter in the conference process. If it does, the cause of death will be a lack of Republican support. That will reinforce the anti-immigrant image of today’s GOP, as well as its generally obstructionist public image — both of which could have serious electoral consequences for a party that’s already on the demographic ropes.

A lively debate is breaking out amongst conservatives about how to handle this challenge. Karl Rove has just published a piece in the Wall Street Journal where he comes down squarely on the pro-immigration reform camp’s side:

If the GOP leaves nonwhite voters to the Democrats, than its margins in safe congressional districts and red states will dwindle—not overnight, but over years and decades.

For example, the Hispanic population in Georgia’s Gwinnett County increased by 153% from 2000 to 2010 while the GOP’s presidential vote in the county dropped to 54% in 2012 from 63.7% in 2000. In Henry County, south of Atlanta, the Hispanic population increased by 339% over the same decade. The GOP’s presidential vote dropped to 51.2% in 2012 from 66.4% in 2000. Republicans ignore changes like these at their peril.

Many conservatives counter that better turnout and support among whites can compensate for losses among Hispanics. Rove takes on that argument directly:

To have prevailed over Mr. Obama in the electoral count, Mr. Romney would have had to carry 62.54% of white voters. That’s a tall order, given that Ronald Reagan received 63% of the white vote in his 1984 victory, according to the Congressional Quarterly’s analysis of major exit polls. It’s unreasonable to expect Republicans to routinely pull numbers that last occurred in a 49-state sweep.

Of course, that’s not to say that it is not technically possible for the Republicans to get increased levels of white support and/or turnout, nor that it’d be impossible to pair that with lower levels of black turnout and/or support for Democrats even as the minority vote continues to grow. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics has outlined all these possibilities in considerable detail (in a later post, I’ll take a more in-depth look at some of Trende’s scenarios).

But just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it’s your best option. Far from it: the fact of the matter is immigration reform is highly likely to happen eventually and is already quite popular among the American public. In a recent Gallup poll, 87 percent of Americans said that, if they could vote on issues on Election Day, they would vote for a law that sounds a lot like the Senate immigration bill. In a recent Pew poll, 71 percent said they supported a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, including 66 percent of whites and 69 percent of independents.

Do Republicans really want to put themselves on the wrong side once again of overwhelming public sentiment, just as they did on background checks for gun purchases? It wreak havoc on their image and not just among Hispanics — they’ll also be looking less attractive to young whites, moderate whites, college-educated whites (particularly women), and basically anyone outside of their hard core of support. That would make their task of jacking up their support among whites to stratospheric levels kind of difficult. In other words, killing immigration reform could wind up being a lose-lose proposition. The choice is theirs.

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Domestic Violence Victim Killed By Boyfriend After ICE Ignored Her Pleas For Protection And Deported Her

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In 2009, Laura S., an undocumented domestic abuse victim was stopped for a driving infraction and pleaded three times with immigration officials to stay in the United States because of a violent ex-boyfriend associated with the Mexican drug cartel. Despite explaining that she would be at risk of death and that she had a protective order against the ex-boyfriend in Texas, Laura was forced to return to Mexico without ever seeing an immigration judge. She was found dead in a burning vehicle five days after she was sent back.

This month, Laura’s family filed a lawsuit, as Equal Voice first reported last week, against the four unknown border agents who allegedly “violated her procedural due process rights and failed and refused to consider her clear eligibility for relief from removal.”

The lawyer handling Laura’s case indicated that “she has seen government documents that say Laura ‘voluntarily returned’ to Mexico…Voluntary departure is not supposed to short cut rights or paperwork.” In fact, Laura “never willingly accepted any voluntary departure, and instead continued to plead that she not be sent to Mexico.”

Efficient, misleading, and under recent litigious scrutiny, voluntary departure is a contentious deportation scare tactic that ICE agents use to tell undocumented immigrants that they can either choose to face months imprisoned while waiting for their cases to be decided, or leave immediately for a chance to gain legal status once they are back in Mexico.

While the promise of legal status is technically true, there would be a ten-year ban for such immigrants who try to apply for the status. This has happened to enough immigrants that a class-action lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, which seeks to make border agents clarify the consequences of voluntary departure, including the ten-year return ban.

In normal immigration proceedings in which a judge would adjudicate the outcome of an immigrant’s status, Laura’s pleas would not have been ignored. The enforcement officials instead detained her, put her in a van, and forced her to cross the border in the middle of the night, according to the lawsuit.

Laura could have been under consideration for the U-visa, which grants temporary deportation reprieve to domestic violence victims. Only 10,000 U-visas are granted every year, of which a majority of the recipients are women from Latin America.

However even with the possibility of a U-visa, there are still more applicants than there are visas every year. Laura’s case thus highlights an extreme, but not rare, incident of how forced border crossings could kill domestic abuse victims.

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Mexican Amusement Park Features Harrowing Fake Border Crossing

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At an amusement park in the rural HñaHñu community of Hidalgo, Mexico, visitors can experience hot springs, rappelling… and simulated border crossing. On Monday, PBS highlighted the three hour border crossing, El Norte, replete with fake smugglers, sirens, border patrol agents, chases, and dogs. The attraction opened in 2004 as an effort to deter migrants from making an actual trip across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The nearly eight-mile hike was created by a group of HñaHñu Indians, who made the real U.S.-Mexico border crossing many times and by one estimate, saw 80 percent of its population attempt the same journey. El Norte founder Alfonso Martinez says, “We wanted to have a type of tourism that really raised people’s understanding…so we decided to turn the painful experience all of us here have gone through into a kind of game that teaches something to our fellow Mexicans.” Unlike real border crossers whose guides abandon them and leave them for dead, these tourists end the night with a lecture from the guides and at most, cuts, sprains, and bruises.

The border crossing simulation highlights the intensity and suffering that has become so much a part of the Latin American immigration story. Late Monday night, the Senate passed a major border security amendment to the immigration bill that could upend future border crossings by making it more treacherous, if not deadly, for migrants to come into the U.S. The amendment would greatly increase the number of border patrol agents, hundreds of miles of fencing, and add surveillance drones along the southern border.”

However, at the cost of $20 per person, the border crossing experience mostly attracts middle-class professionals, students, and Mexican urbanites, people who all say that “they will not do it themselves.” While net undocumented immigration is at or below zero, the reality is that poor migrants desperate for a better life would make the journey despite the risks. A report finds that even with tougher border security measures, 43 percent of detainees surveyed at an AZ detention center would attempt and re-attempt border crossings, many for the sake of family reunification.

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What the DOMA Decision Means for LGBT Binational Couples

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On the 10th anniversary of its landmark decision decriminalizing LGBT people, the Supreme Court handed down a historic decision repealing the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which required the government to ignore legal marriages of same-sex couples and prevented them from accessing federal benefits.

Today’s ruling is especially significant to the estimated 24,700 binational LGBT couples in the United States. Among the many policy implications as a result of the decision, the repeal of DOMA will permit legally married LGBT United States citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) to sponsor their foreign-born spouses for green cards.

DOMA defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman and denied LGBT couples access to more than 1,000 federal programs and benefits available to opposite-sex married couples. That included the ability to sponsor a foreign born spouse for family-based immigration United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Now, families like Ness Madeiros and her wife Ginger, who have lived in fear of separation for too long, will finally get relief. Though they were legally married in Massachusetts in 2008, DOMA barred Ginger, an American citizen, from sponsoring her wife Ness, an immigrant from Bermuda. Without a green card, Ness is unable to officially adopt their 8-month-old son, Jamie — and worse, risks being deported back to Bermuda when her student visa expires. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Ginger can now sponsor her wife for an immigration visa and her family no longer has to fear being torn apart.

To provide relief for LGBT binational couples, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced an amendment to the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform bill that would allow LGBT U.S. citizens and LPRs to petition for their foreign spouses to become permanent residents. The court’s decision is an important step towards giving equal treatment to same-sex binational couples under immigration law and accomplishes much of what Sen. Leahy’s amendment sought to do.

While today’s decision is a good first step that provides hope for a future together for 24,700 same-sex binational couples, there are still 11 million undocumented immigrants, including more than a quarter of a million LGBT immigrants and their family members in dire need of relief. Passing the bipartisan Senate immigration bill would add tremendously to the gains made by the Court’s decision.

Leahy withdrew his amendment to the Senate immigration bill, explaining that the Supreme Court’s decision renders it unnecessary.

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New Generation of Immigrant Farmers Thrive With Help of Aid Programs

(Credit: Amy Mayer/ Harvest Public Media)

This week, Harvest Public Media highlighted the growing trend of immigrant farmers cropping up in the Midwest, who are helping to break the barriers into a predominately Caucasian career. Because minority farmers often do not qualify for government farm aid, local community organizations are specifically mentoring minority farmers to become successful at producing sustainable farming and food systems.

The number of immigrant farmers has surely grown in recent times as more immigrants move to the Midwest and are on track to significantly outpace the increase of all U.S. farm operators. The latest agricultural census taken in 2007 indicates that the number of Latino and Hispanic farmers was up fourteen percent, African-American farmers was up nine percent, and Asian farmers increased by about forty percent from the previous 2002 census.

The growing presence of America’s newest farmers, rather than farm employees, come at a time when more than 40 percent of Iowa farmers are going into retirement.

Unlike their U.S.-born counterparts, immigrant farmers do not have the same cultural roots, language familiarity and community ties. Organizations like the National Immigrant Farming Initiative and the Practical Farmers of Iowa’s Savings Incentive Program help immigrant farmers to save money, to meet with mentors, and to write a business plan. They also teach these farmers to run a profitable business.

The enactment of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act was meant to protect agricultural farm employees and to enable better pay and working conditions, but it has not dissuaded people from exploiting immigrants. Immigrant laborers are often exposed to under-compensation and long hours. The terrible work conditions are so systemic that California introduced state legislation to protect immigrants from abuse and slave-like conditions.

As a result, aid organizations have come out to actually help those immigrants to sustain and to better adapt to farming regulations. Migrant advocacy programs like the Migrant Legal Action Program actively seeks to help subsidize farmers. Regardless of the produce of their land, the change of employment status between immigrant day-laborer and farmer could mean the difference between exploitation and being a self-sufficient boss. As such, becoming a farmer is an empowering show of an agricultural worker’s uphill climb.

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