Senate Immigration Deal Fails to Measure Up Against Barbara Jordan’s Credibility Yardstick

Feb 8, 2024 Update: Following intense public backlash, the Senate voting against advancing the bill.

Barbara Jordan had a simple yardstick to measure credible immigration enforcement.

“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”

The Senate’s $118 billion border bill fails to measure up. Here are some of the details:

• Requires catch-and-release through new “noncustodial proceedings”
• Allows asylum officers to grant asylum without a hearing from a judge. Changes credible fear standard to “reasonable” from “significant” fear of persecution
• Gives instant work permits to asylum seekers
• Includes green cards for paroled Afghans and 10,000 more special immigrant visas
• Adds 50,000 green cards each year for 5 years
• Grants indefinite work authorization to roughly 25,000 adult children of temporary (H-1B) guest workers
• REQUIRES releasing a minimum of 1,400 inadmissable aliens a day during border surges (i.e. an illegal immigration floor of 511,000 per year)
• Creates a “border emergency authority” that triggers when illegal immigration surpasses 5,000 a day on average over a week (or 8,500 in a single day) and gives the president the authority to not use the “required” authority.

Even analysts who favor more permissive enforcement policies are amazed by that last one.

To recap: the Senate bill does not close loopholes to asylum fraud or end the abuse of humanitarian parole. Those are the twin abuses of the immigration system that are fueling the crisis. As long as the government continues to release inadmissable aliens into the country using bogus asylum claims, the crisis will continue. Rather than ending the abuses, the Senate bill creates an additional incentive to try to game the system by granting instant work permits to asylum seekers.

Furthermore, Senate proposal requires the release of “a minimum of 1,400 inadmissable aliens each calendar day cumulatively across the southwest land border ports of entry.” Senate leaders are selling this bill to the public as a crackdown on immigration abuses when it actually requires a minimum level of illegal immigration of more than 500,000 per year.

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Indifference to American Workers

The bill does not offer relief from the border crisis. The authors have included nothing to offer cities and communities overwhelmed by the migrant surge. The White House and Senate leadership continue to show indifference to the two thirds of Americans without college degrees who are disproportionately robbed of wealth accumulation by federal immigration policies.

• If the labor force participation rate was back to where it was as recently as 2000, there would be 6.5 million more Americans in the workforce.
• Since 1990 – when Congress increased immigration to the current more-than-one-million per year – labor force participation first stagnated and then declined among men and women.
• Work rates have an outsized impact on poverty, especially for the bottom third of U.S. families.
• Declining employment and earnings is a significant factor in declining marriage rates, especially for Black men (all education levels) and less-educated white men.
• American men outside the labor force are overrepresented in “deaths of despair.” American men are the most stressed compared to their counterparts around the world.
• Black Americans have had jobless rates of roughly twice that of whites since 1972.

The supporters of the Senate bill may not be consciously attempting to harm these Americans, but they are demonstrating a profound indifference. Not only does the bill require high levels of illegal immigration, but it slips in large increases in green cards and renewable work permits to the tune of hundreds of thousands. This bill will exacerbate the reverse-Robin-Hood wealth redistribution effects at all skill levels.

Better Immigration Is Possible

Senate leaders released the text of the bill on a Sunday evening. They planned to hold a vote 48 hours later. NumbersUSA’s team worked late into the night to comb through the immigration language so American voters could be informed and activated before the vote. The legislation is what Pamela Denise Long calls “Destructive BiPartisanship“:

“The bill was supposed to end the illegal immigration crisis by adding additional mechanisms to keep unvetted people out of interior of our nation. In an act of defiance, the Senate bill incentivizes rapid mass immigration (from adults and unaccompanied children) rather than preventing it.”

By contrast, Barbara Jordan chaired the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which recommended immigration reforms in the interests of all Americans . . . especially the most vulnerable.

“Many American workers do not now have adequate job prospects,” Jordan said. “We should not make that task harder with unskilled foreign labor.”

A better immigration system requires not only stopping bills like this one, but passing sensible reforms – with roots in the “constructive bipartisanship” of the Jordan Commission – like H.R. 2.

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