Working in immigrant resettlement and advocacy in Central Florida - a statement that usually elicits a sympathetic cringe or eyebrow raise from others when heard for the first time - is a very hands-on, typically unsung experience. Walking into a well-lit, professionally broadcasted event on immigration policy in Washington, DC, was almost disorienting – things look different from ten stories off the ground. Still, this conversation at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) targeted a universal truth, one which is increasingly impossible to ignore whether you are an asylum seeker in Gainesville or a policymaker on Capitol Hill: America’s immigration system is fundamentally broken.
“Legal Immigration: Challenges and Promising Paths Forward,” was opened by Jack Malde, Senior Policy Analyst at the BPC. Malde broke down key aspects of the invariably complicated US immigration system, focusing on visa and green card application backlogs. The current immigration system, instituted by Congress over thirty years ago, maintains caps on the number of distributable visas and green cards that matched the immigration demand of 1986 and have not been adapted since. This impacts not only those applying for residence for the first time, but also those with temporary visas who are awaiting their turn for permanent status. Consequently, this creates a bottleneck in migrant processing, as demand greatly exceeds the available amount of visas and green cards. The BPC’s research has found that clearing these backlogs would generate trillions of dollars in GDP gains, while solidifying status for millions of migrants who have followed the rules of the immigration system but are no closer to achieving permanent status.
The panel, which was moderated by Andrew Kreighbaum, an Immigration Reporter at Bloomberg Law, featured Jon Baselice, Vice President of Immigration Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Martin Kim, Director of Immigration Advocacy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, David Bier, Associate Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, and Dip Patel, Founder of Improve the Dream.
Bier, an expert in current migration policy, began the panel by explaining that there are four options for an individual seeking to migrate to the US: the refugee program, which allows 25,000 admissions out of one million applications per year, the “diversity lottery,” family sponsorship, or employer sponsorship. Bier emphasized that the likelihood of legally achieving admission to the United States is extremely slim and that it is almost impossible for one to even “get in line.” The inability of the current immigration system to process or grant requests for temporary visas leaves a majority of applicants without any feasible path to permanent residence.
Baselice focused his input on the economic impacts of failing to process economic visa applicants and allow new migrants into the country as workers. Only accounting for adults, there are currently 1.3 million individuals in the employment-based backlog, 93% of whom are established employees working in the US on a temporary status. As Bier pointed out, an applicant is statistically much more likely to die while waiting for a green card than ever coming close to receiving one. With employees uncertain of their ability to remain in the country or achieve permanent status, employers lack the ability to attract and retain workers, creating an intense talent exodus from the US. In response, some major companies are opting to move their offices abroad. The current visa caps are completely divorced from economic realities, Baselice stated. He emphasized how there is proof of concept for international competitors to ‘poach’ the American labor force stuck in visa lines: in June, the Canadian government advertised the availability of special Canadian work permits to those currently stuck waiting in the US employment migration process. The 10,000 available spots were filled in a day.
Notably, the conversation around employment-based visas almost exclusively focused on “skilled” workers, or those with advanced degrees or qualifications. All panelists advocated for increased admittance of this demographic into the country but noticeably failed to address the 8.1 million undocumented workers currently composing the US workforce. According to New American Economy, over 36% of the entire American agricultural labor force, a total of nearly 250,000 individuals, are currently undocumented. The panel danced around this massive component of creating practical and comprehensive immigration reform in current contexts.
Obtaining residence through family-based sponsorship is also a virtually insurmountable process. When a child brought to the US on a family-sponsored visa turns 21, they are kicked off of their parent’s case and must reapply for any type of status, with 610,000 such applications per year. As Patel, a Dreamer who founded the nonprofit Improve the Dream to advocate for other DACA recipients, pointed out, it is commonplace for a child to come to the US legally, grow up here, and still have no viable path to citizenship or permanent residence. Some aged-out individuals are forced to self-deport, which Patel exemplified through one such instance of a registered nurse who had to flee the US, where she was raised and educated, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. The near impossibility of the American immigration system is making it increasingly unpopular internationally, Patel concluded. Today, less than 10% of those looking to emigrate internationally attempt to go to the US, a historically low percentage.
The panelists turned to what they believe to be both short and long-term solutions to these problems in the immigration system. Bier referenced humanitarian parole, a short-term solution in which asylum seekers can be legally and financially sponsored by private citizens for up to two years while awaiting their turn for an asylum hearing. This system alone has relocated 500,000 individuals from the southern border to cities across the country, where migrants begin integrating into communities and the workforce. However, this is nowhere near a complete solution, as humanitarian parole does not include a path to permanent citizenship and places responsibilities on willing private citizens to provide funding and assistance that could instead be allocated from the government. Still, it could be a base model for a new approach to immigration that, with significant modification, would allow new arrivals a path to apply for and achieve long-term residence and status. As Baslice noted during the panel, any immigration reform must contain mechanisms that allow policies to evolve and remain efficient and relevant at the time of its application, a feature which current systems glaringly lack.
In the concluding Q&A portion of the event, an audience member pressed the panel on a notably unaddressed issue: regardless of how much bipartisan support and credible research there is for legal immigration reform, will politicians ever be willing to give up the political capital of fear-mongering around immigrants and advocating for further migration restriction? Though blanching slightly, all members of the panel maintained their confidence in achieving support for increasing pathways to legal immigration, as long as facts about the current situation continued to be made common knowledge. Bier answered that while many Americans fear chaos at the border, more legal pathways to citizenship will drastically reduce the number of individuals stuck there, reducing reasons for manufactured panic.
Creating such common knowledge about migration realities and overcoming political alarmism are crucial to setting the stage for comprehensive immigration reform. In the foreseeable future, one which will be marked by exponentially increasing flows of migrants fleeing climate disaster, conflict, and economic instability, creating functional systems for immigrating into the US is vital. Action on migration reform is no longer only the responsibility of the on-the-ground organizers and volunteers, but an issue that necessitates initiative from the highest levels of government, if the US seeks to create policy that will adequately respond to the geopolitical and economic conditions of the present and future.