Biden's 'Day 1' Immigration Reform Plan Sparks Hope in California

The newly minted Biden White House unveiled on Wednesday the contours of an ambitious immigration reform bill that would offer most undocumented people living in the United States a shot at becoming citizens.

This step, and a string of executive actions signed by President Joe Biden just hours after his inauguration, signaled a decisive sea change in American immigration policy that many in California celebrated.

“We celebrate because it represents the affirmation of our human dignity, as immigrants,” said Angelica Salas, a prominent immigrant advocate who grew up undocumented and saw her mother get deported. “It affirms our need to be able to live in this country free.”

“And we’ve gotten to this day because of our hard work and persistence,” added Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of Biden’s reform plan – the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 – would allow the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who pass background checks and pay taxes to apply for legal status and, after eight years, for U.S. citizenship.

But that pathway would be much faster – only three years – for young people brought to the U.S. as children, the so-called Dreamers who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The faster three-year period would also apply to immigrants with humanitarian protections, known as temporary protected status, and farmworkers.

“I feel grateful that our President Joe Biden is trying to offer us a new reform, so that when we leave home to work, we know we are safe from deportation,” said Geronimo, a farmworker in the Coachella Valley who declined to give his last name because of his immigration status.

The Mexican immigrant said he has lived in California for 30 years, and that he hoped the relief would materialize for all undocumented people.

“This is still a country of dreams and opportunity,” he said.

The new president also used his first day in office to sign a string of executive orders that reversed some of the previous administration’s most controversial and restrictive policies.

With the stroke of a pen, Biden halted the construction of Trump’s border wall, preserved protections for more than 600,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. as children who are enrolled in DACA, and prompted immigration authorities to halt deportations for 100 days while they review their enforcement priorities.

Other executive orders revoked a Trump administration plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census, and – as promised on the campaign trail – the new president ended Trump's travel ban on mostly Muslim-majority and African nations.

Tens of thousands of impacted individuals will now have the opportunity to reunite in the U.S. with family members abroad, said Zahra Billoo, executive director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in San Francisco.

“For millions more, the message that Islamophobic immigration policies will not be tolerated will resonate deeply,” said Billoo in a statement. “While we know our work is far from over ... we celebrate the heroic efforts undertaken by so many over the last several years in our effort to repeal the Muslim and African bans."

With its goal of legalizing the vast majority of undocumented people, Biden’s immigration reform plan is much more ambitious than proposals from recent past administrations, said Deep Gulasekaram, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

“Looks a lot closer to what the Reagan administration did 34 years ago with the last major amnesty, your last major legalization program that Congress enacted, than it does to some of the more tepid proposals of the last 10 to 15 years,” he said.

Biden’s plan includes measures to clear the massive backlog of cases in immigration courts, and for family-sponsored visa applications. The bill would also increase funding for improved screening technology at the border, and offer financial assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to tackle the extreme poverty and violence that push asylum seekers to flee to the U.S. in the first place.

But Gulasekaram and others cautioned that Biden’s bill may significantly change during upcoming negotiations, as Democrats need Republican support in the Senate to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

“I think that one can take this as an initial negotiating position,” he said. “There’s likely going to have to be some compromise here.”

Prominent GOP senators, such as Charles Grassley from Iowa, blasted the plan as a "nonstarter," as reported by Roll Call.

“A mass amnesty with no safeguards and no strings attached is a nonstarter," Grassley said in a statement. "As we’ve seen before, that approach only encourages further violations of our immigration laws."