[NOW Action List] Tell Congress: Immigration Bill Must Be Real Reform, Not Punishment

Support NOW's Work |	June 12, 2006	| Tell a Friend

Action Needed Background All NOW Actions Immigration Reform Resources		Any Immigration Bill Must Be Real Reform, Not Punishment Congress must not support an immigration bill that builds walls and prisons, separates families and promotes fear. On May 25, the United States Senate passed S.2611, the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006," by a vote of 62-36. The House had passed its own "reform" bill last December and now it is up to a conference committee to work out the differences between these two bills and get a final bill to the President for signing just before the fall elections. Our representatives in Congress need to hear from us! We must demand that the final bill include a path to citizenship for immigrants, provide for improved working conditions, preserve existing Violence Against Women Act provisions that relate to immigrant women, and must not include provisions for walls and/or prisons at the border. Action Needed: Send a message to the Conference committee members who are in the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Additional members will be added in the future, but these leaders will be the key players on crafting any final bill. Send a message to your own Senators and Representative Background: While the Senate bill is being heralded as the best measure possible to come out of a bad bargain, it contains many flaws that are inconsistent with the feminist values and goals of the National Organization for Women. It builds fences, walls and prisons and will increase the harassment of undocumented workers and their families. While the Senate bill is an improvement over the punitive HR 4437 passed by the House of Representatives last December (that version makes undocumented presence in the country a felony), the Senate legislation falls short in many areas, such as increased fees/penalties (now up to $3200), reduction in the number of legal temporary workers (now down to 200,000), and making residency more difficult. In order to obtain documents for legal residency, immigrants will have to meet requirements that are now only necessary for those applying for citizenship (such as English proficiency and a civics test) Although the Senate bill makes a good faith attempt to provide a "path to citizenship," which the U.S. has historically offered to immigrants, it sets up an awkward and almost unworkable three-tiered system to determine eligibility for citizenship. It would require deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for less than two years; would force those who have been here for between two and five years to leave the country and reapply for entry, putting them at the "end of the line" and thus lengthening the time that they will have to be away from families and jobs; and would allow those who can prove that they have lived here longer than five years to apply for residency. For the latter, the path to citizenship would take a minimum of 11 years. This system, which by many accounts would be almost impossible to implement and monitor, would separate families, continue to keep undocumented people in the shadows and would create an atmosphere of fear among the undocumented immigrant communities. In addition, the Senate made adjustments to the temporary "guest" worker program -- including requiring employers to seek qualified U.S. workers before turning to immigrant workers. Guest workers are just that -- people who must go home after a certain amount of time with no chance to "settle" here in the U.S. and seek permanent residency and citizenship. To complicate matters, the Senate stealthily added a measure to their version of the bill which would raise revenue by requiring that undocumented immigrants pay all outstanding tax liabilities and allow the IRS to devise a system to tax them. This has the potential to make the Senate bill unconstitutional because all tax legislation must originate in the House. The House will either have to pass a new bill with this provision in it, or the Senate must pass a new bill that drops this part. As if it weren't complicated enough, add to the mixture Speaker Dennis Hastert's policy of allowing votes on major issues only if a majority of the House's 231 Republicans back them. Theoretically, a compromise immigration bill could be supported by most of the House's Democrats and nearly half of its Republicans -- making up a clear majority in the 435-seat chamber -- only to be thwarted by Hastert's dictum. There is little likelihood that an immigration bill which comes from the bipartisan conference will be supported by over half of the House Republican and agreement between the President and the leaders of both houses is very unlikely as well. But in these political times where bills are passed out of spite and hatred, we shouldn't put it past the anti-immigrant lawmakers to come up with some gimmick just in time to cause turmoil near the fall elections and confuse the voters. We must not let our guard down. For more information, visit our Immigration Reform Resources page. Actions Needed: Send a message to the Conference committee members who are in the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Additional members will be added in the future, but these leaders will be the key players on crafting any final bill. Send a message to your own Senators and Representative
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