By Richard Hernandez
Characterizing the Donald Trump Administration’s effort to round up and deport those in the United States who are unregistered aliens from foreign countries as “extreme and overreaching,” senior California U.S. Senator Alex Padilla announced this week that he is introducing legislation that will transform a substantial number of those who have been in the country for over seven years into U.S. citizens.
If the measure Padilla is sponsoring is passed into law and overcomes what most assuredly will be a veto by President Donald Trump, approaching 96,000 of the 127,681 unregistered aliens in San Bernardino County would not only be provided with permanent residency status but have the opportunity to obtain full rights as U.S. citizens, including the ability to participate in the voting process.
On August 5, Padilla appeared on the CBS Late Show, which was being taped at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Padilla decried the Donald Trump Administrations “Obsession with this massive deportation agenda,” which he characterized as being cruel and unpopular and involving indiscriminate enforcement unprecedented militarization, which he said came in response to overwhelmingly peaceful protests in Los Angeles.
According to Padilla, the administration’s anti-immigrant actions are stoking fear in communities across the county, most particularly in California. He told Colbert he was offering a better path forward under a program that would modernize the United States’ “outdated” immigration system, including his bill to update the existing immigrant registry statute and expand a pathway to permanent lawful residency for, in the words of his office, “millions of long-term U.S. residents.”
Of the Trump Administration’s deployment of the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles in support of the ongoing deportment effort by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Padilla said, “Most of the Marines have finally been withdrawn. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Not only was it not helpful, it was actually counterproductive. But of course, Donald Trump just wants the spectacle. He’s trying to escalate tensions whenever he can.”
Padilla said that the use of the National Guard and the Marines in this fashion was a factor related to President Trump’s “wannabe tough guy persona.”
Padilla said, “Most of the National Guard troops are gone, but that being said, look, the fear is still there. The terror is still there. It’s palpable. I don’t just hear from constituents — I hear from friends, I hear from family, because the reality is this about their mass deportation operation. They’d like to talk about targeting violent criminals. When you’re going to workplaces to round up immigrants, it’s not because they’re not working. If they’re combing through IRS data to try to find where immigrants are, it’s not about immigrants not paying taxes. When they’re going to courthouses to entrap immigrants who are showing up to their court hearings, it’s not that they’re not doing it the right way.”
Padilla said, “I’m hopeful because it’s not just me that has called out this administration for being extreme and overreaching. The public polling, the American people know that this is wrong and an abuse of power when even Steven Scalise from Louisiana, the number two Republican in the house, says there’s got to be a better way, I’m hoping and praying that things are shifting just enough.”
Of those in the United States illegally, Padilla said, “They deserve a way to come out of the shadows and take a step towards legal status and so, surprise, surprise, I have a bill. It’s called ‘updating the registry. As a registry law that’s been on the books for almost a century with a deadline that has been a moving target over the last 100 years, last updated under Republican president Ronald Reagan, that says if you’ve been here for seven years or longer, you’ve paid your taxes, no conviction, et cetera, a few other requirements, you should be able to register and move towards legal status. So I introduced a bill to do just that.”
Padilla last month announced his involvement with U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), Ben Ray Luján (D-New MMexico), Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), Patty Murray (D-Washingto), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Adam Schiff (D-California) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) in promoting legislation he is proposing, known as Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929, which would update the existing Registry statute of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by adjusting the registry date to meet current circumstances so that an immigrant may qualify to apply for lawful permanent resident status if he or she has lived in the U.S. continuously for at least seven years before filing an application, does not have a criminal record, and meets all other current eligibility requirements to receive a green card.
This would, Padilla said, expand a pathway to lawful permanent residency for millions of long-term U.S. residents. Padilla called the bill “a forward-looking, strategic update to our outdated immigration system to counter President Trump and [Deputy White House Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller’s demonization of undocumented immigrant communities.”
Padilla asserted that “This overdue update would provide a much-needed pathway to a green card for more than 8 million people, including Dreamers, forcibly displaced citizens (TPS holders), children of long-term visa holders, essential workers, and highly skilled members of our workforce, such as H-1B visa holders, who have been waiting years for a green card to become available. [I]f the undocumented individuals covered in this bill eventually became citizens, they would contribute approximately $121 billion to the U.S. economy annually and about $35 billion in taxes.”
Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is co-leading the legislation in the Senate, and Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California-18) is leading companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
“Americans know there’s a better path forward than the Trump Administration’s cruel scapegoating of hardworking immigrants and fearmongering of California communities,” said Padilla. “We believe that if you’ve lived here for over seven years, paid taxes for years, contributed to your community for years, and you don’t have a criminal record, then you deserve a pathway to legalization. My bill is a commonsense fix to our outdated immigration system and the same kind of reform that Republican President Ronald Reagan embraced four decades ago, calling it a ‘matter of basic fairness.’ This legislation creates no new bureaucracies or agencies — it’s simply an update to a longstanding pathway to reflect today’s reality and provide a fair shot at the American Dream.”
“Recently, we have seen devastating arrests of immigrants who have spent their lives in this country, building communities and families in the United States, without any due process. Most have never committed any crime. Protections for these hard-working individuals are long overdue. It’s common sense that immigrants who pose no safety threat and contribute to our country should be able to call America home with certainty; additionally, it’s also common sense that the small percentage of undocumented immigrants who do commit violent crimes should be removed. Expanding the registry pathway to citizenship is a practical solution to provide stability to immigrants who have worked and contributed to our country for years. It’s part of the solution, and I look forward to working to pass this bill into law,” said U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Durbin, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“When Donald Trump ran for president, he pledged to deport violent criminals. Instead, masked, heavily-armed agents, often refusing to identify themselves, are aggressively, sometimes violently, targeting day laborers, busboys, farmworkers, and some of the hardest-working people in this country. It’s outrageous and deserves the condemnation of every Member of Congress. We need to control our borders, but we also need a straightforward reform solution for those who have resided peacefully for a long time in America,” said Representative Lofgren. “My colleagues and I are reintroducing our registry legislation to simply update a historically-bipartisan provision that provides lawful permanent resident status to vetted immigrants who have been a part of our communities for years. Providing stability to our communities and our workforces – versus terrorizing them – will make our country stronger.”
Section 249 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Registry, gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the discretion to register certain individuals for lawful permanent resident status if they have been in the country since a certain date and meet other requirements. Section 249 was first codified in 1929 and Congress has modified it four times, most recently during the Reagan Administration in 1986. No changes have been made since 1986, and the cutoff date for eligibility remains January 1, 1972 — more than 50 years ago.
Specifically, the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929 would:
• Amend the existing Registry statute by moving the eligibility cutoff date so that an immigrant may qualify for lawful permanent resident status if they have been in the U.S. for at least seven years before filing an application under Registry.
• Preempt the need for further congressional action by making the eligibility cutoff rolling, instead of tying it to a specific date, as it is now.
While Padilla and those on his team characterize what the senator is attempting to do as “commonsense immigration reforms that strengthen communities, protect long-term residents, and unlock America’s economic potential,” there are others who see it differently. They believe that willful violation of United States immigration laws by definition makes those in the country illegally criminals. Such criminals in the country raising families, it is pointed out, are, by their very presence and evasion of immigration authorities, inculcating in their children a disrespect for the law. The sheer numbers of those present in the country illegally, which range between an estimated low of 12 million to an estimated high of 18.5 million, and the roughly 2.2 million believed to be at large in California, leave unquantified the foreigners who have committed offenses beyond mere immigration law violations who have insinuated themselves into and remain hidden in the general population. This has created an underground population that in many ways is impenetrable by law enforcement or other offshoots of governmental authority. Some illegal aliens/undocumented migrants pay taxes. Some do not. Some have tapped into social welfare programs paid for by taxpayers. Some of those illegal aliens are laying claim to social welfare benefits provided through state and local government intended for American citizens. In the view of a significant number of American citizens, this is an injustice, particularly in light of the consideration that some American citizens, ones who are registered with the government in multiple ways and are paying taxes, are periodically denied those benefits.
In San Bernardino County, 5.77 percent of the population consists of those in the country illegally. Put another way, more than 57 out of every 1,000 people residing in San Bernardino County are undocumented aliens. The federal government’s best estimate, based on a combination of both publicly available data and information obtained through confidential assets, is that there were 127,681 illegal immigrants – that is to say undocumented migrants present and in defiance of federal law – in San Bernardino County in the weeks just prior to Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Of those, roughly 71.8 percent, or 91,675, were from Mexico, while 6.1 percent or 7,789 were from El Salvador and 4.3 percent or 5,490 were from Guatemala and just a tad under 11 percent (10.9938 percent) or 14,037 were from Asia. Those numbers are not believed to have changed in any significant way over the last seven months. An estimated 75 percent or 95,761 of those 127,681 unregistered aliens are believed to have been in the country for more than seven years, making them qualified for the amnesty that would be conferred upon them by Padilla’s bill. Padilla has not yet specified what standards or criteria those individuals would need to meet or what requirements they would have to fulfill to obtain not just legal residency status but U.S. citizenship.
Neither Padilla nor Durbin, Booker, Duckworth, Luján, Markey, Murphy, Murray, Sanders, Schatz, Schiff, Warren nor Lofgren have publicly discussed or commented on the prospect of getting the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929 legislation passed in either the Senate, where the Republicans hold a-53-seat-to-45-seat-edge over the Democrats, or in the House of Representatives, where there are 219 Republicans and 214 Democrats and four vacancies. Even if passage were to be obtained, it would appear unlikely that there would be enough votes available to achieve the two-thirds repassage of the legislation if it were to be vetoed by President Trump.