Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future

By Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava and Penny Lewis

A provocative, strategic plan for a humane immigration system from the nation’s leading immigration scholars and activists

During the past decade, right-wing nativists have stoked popular hostility to the nation’s foreign-born population, forcing the immigrant rights movement into a defensive posture. In the Trump years, preoccupied with crisis upon crisis, advocates had few opportunities to consider questions of long-term policy or future strategy. Now is the time for a reset.

Immigration Matters offers a new, actionable vision for immigration policy. It brings together key movement leaders and academics to share cutting-edge approaches to the urgent issues facing the immigrant community, along with fresh solutions to vexing questions of so-called “future flows” that have bedeviled policy makers for decades. The book also explores the contributions of immigrants to the nation’s identity, its economy, and progressive movements for social change. Immigration Matters delves into a variety of topics including new ways to frame immigration issues, fresh thinking on key aspects of policy, challenges of integration, workers’ rights, family reunification, legalization, paths to citizenship, and humane enforcement.

The perfect handbook for immigration activists, scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about one of the most contentious issues of our age, Immigration Matters makes accessible an immigration policy that both remediates the harm done to immigrant workers and communities under Trump and advances a bold new vision for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The New Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781620976586

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis

Immigration is among the pivotal, most hotly debated questions of the twenty-first century. Right-wing demagogues have deployed it as the leading wedge issue to rally their base, put the Left on the defensive, and speak to the cultural and economic anxieties of those in the middle. In the United States, the Right—once divided between a pro-immigration corporate bloc and a nativist wing—is now united behind a nationalist, nativist position. It is a motley coalition: avowed racists, strategic racists, people who are not racist but support greater limits on migration, and finally the corporate class, which has surrendered on this issue in order to retain its influence on other matters. The strategy of mobilizing racialized fear and resentment has been used across Europe and the United States to bring right-wing parties to power and to reverse not only pro-immigrant policies but also bedrock labor, civil rights, and social welfare protections. This strategy is formidable, as Trump’s victory in 2016 and Brexit (among other examples) demonstrated, and it remains a potent threat.

In the United States, as elsewhere, the nativist turn has been disastrous in its humanitarian impact. Many fewer refugees escaping persecution have been permitted to enter than in the recent past. Families of asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America have been deliberately separated, with children infamously detained in cages. The 11 million undocumented immigrants present in the United States have been living in fear of a ramped-up interior enforcement apparatus. The Dreamers—young immigrants who entered the country without authorization as children accompanying their parents—were in limbo, as the 2012 program that protects them from deportation and allows them to work legally was threatened with termination. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Central American, African, and Asian immigrants who fled natural and human-made disasters faced possible loss of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) they were granted long ago. Legal immigrants have had to wait years to become citizens or to be reunited with family members seeking to join them in the United States. And since the COVID-19 crisis began, despite being hailed as essential, immigrant workers have found themselves shut out of much of the aid provided by the pandemic recovery bills passed by Congress in 2020.

The costs of anti-immigrant policies have not only been borne by immigrants themselves. As racist and nativist rhetoric has escalated, U.S.-born citizens of color also have been victimized by wave after wave of hate crimes. As working conditions are degraded for vulnerable immigrant workers, their U.S.-born co-workers suffer as well, as in the meatpacking industry. The United States is forfeiting the immense economic, cultural, and other benefits that migrants denied entry could have contributed, and the racism and cruelty of U.S. immigration policy have cast a long shadow over the nation’s international standing and its very identity.

Nativist attacks have also catalyzed extraordinary reactions, however. Thousands of people—including many non-immigrants who had not previously shown concern—have taken to the streets in response to some of the Trump administration’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies, such as the Muslim ban and the separation of children from their parents at the border. Opinion research also offers evidence of a backlash to the backlash, with growing sympathy toward immigrants and a modest decline in support for nativism.¹ The Trump era has exposed the nation’s contradictory history—its much-vaunted image as a welcoming nation of immigrants and a multicultural melting pot contrasting with episodes of harsh restrictionism and racialized animosity toward newcomers.

In the twenty-first century, immigrants are central to every aspect of American life. An increasing share of the population is foreign-born or first-generation American, and both groups play a critical role in the U.S. economy. Immigrant organizing is one of the few bright spots in the recent history of the beleaguered U.S. labor movement as well. With foreign-born employment concentrated in both low-wage sectors and high-skill sectors, the immigration question is inextricably intertwined with the debate about soaring economic inequality. Over the past five decades, as Latinx, Asian, and African newcomers have fueled the growth of the non-white population, immigration also has become embedded in discussions of white supremacy and institutional racism. Given the nation’s shifting demography, any durable progressive political coalition will have to include immigrants at its center. The contributors to this volume take these developments as a starting point for their analyses of the U.S. immigration system and the politics shaping it, as well as for their proposals for reform.

Historical Background

From the nation’s inception, immigrants and their descendants have made up the vast bulk of the U.S. population, with the crucial exception of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and their descendants. With the exception of the half century between the end of World War I and the late 1960s, the United States has welcomed massive numbers of newcomers throughout its history. Not only has this fulfilled the promise immortalized in Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet, Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, emblazoned on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty. Immigration has also fueled U.S. economic dynamism, past and present, both by meeting employers’ demand for labor in periods of growth and by continuously attracting talented, creative individuals from across the globe. Indeed, immigrants account for more than one-quarter of all U.S. patents and for one-third of all U.S. Nobel Prize recipients in chemistry, physics, medicine, and economics; both figures are highly disproportionate to the foreign-born share of the nation’s population, which has never exceeded 15 percent.² Yet nativism also has been a powerful current throughout U.S. history, its ebb and flow reflected in the complex patchwork of immigration laws that have accumulated over the past century and a half.

As Figure 1 shows, the foreign-born share of the population hit a record low in 1970, following decades of severely limited immigration following the passage of restrictive legislation after World War I, most importantly the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. That marked a historical break from the preceding period of open immigration from Europe, when the foreign-born share of the population hovered between 10 and 15 percent. But the era of restriction was relatively short-lived: with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the pre–World War I pattern of mass immigration—although now from Latin America, Asia, and Africa rather than Europe—was gradually restored. More recently, the Trump administration took steps to once again restrict immigration, albeit in the absence of new legislation.

In 2018, the 45 million foreign-born people residing in the United States made up 13.7 percent of the nation’s population, only slightly below the record high of 14.8 percent, set in 1890.³ In 2018 there were also 16 million second-generation immigrants—U.S.-born children with at least one immigrant parent.⁴ But while the foreign-born share of the population today approximates that of a century ago, immigration is far more regulated in the twenty-first century than it was in the pre–World War I era. Another crucial contrast is that whereas in the earlier period the vast majority of immigrants originated in various parts of Europe, since 1965 most have come from the global South.

Figure 1: Percentage of U.S. population that is foreign-born, 1860–2017.

Note: Share foreign-born is for the fifty states and District of Columbia.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States, 1850–2000 and Pew Research Center; www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/13/19-striking-findings-from-2019.

Immigration is governed by a crazy quilt of laws and regulations dating back to the late nineteenth century, highlights of which are summarized in Figure 2. The two most important laws, mentioned earlier, were those passed in 1924 and 1965, each of which fundamentally reconfigured the basic architecture of U.S. immigration policy. But in the half century since the 1965 Hart-Celler Act took effect, it has been modified by a series of additional laws and regulations, giving rise to an elaborate and confusing bureaucratic web that is notoriously difficult for immigrants and their advocates to navigate. As a result, well before the Trump era, the system was widely regarded as dysfunctional or broken by policymakers across the political spectrum and by the larger public.

Before World War I, the rules were far simpler. There were no numerical limits on overall admissions to the country. Prospective immigrants did not have to obtain visas prior to arrival; they were simply screened by U.S. government officials at Ellis Island and other ports of entry. For Europeans and residents of the Western Hemisphere (unlike Asians, who were targeted by restrictive laws starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), this was an era of open borders. Less than 1 percent of the 25 million Europeans who arrived in the United States between 1880 and World War I were turned away, and deportation was rare. Indeed, in this period the phenomenon of undocumented immigration was virtually unknown.⁵

Figure 2: Milestones in U.S. Immigration Law

THE IMMIGRATION ACT OF 1882 levied a tax of 50 cents for each passenger arriving by ship from a foreign port who was not a U.S. citizen, to be deposited into the U.S. Treasury’s immigration fund, for use in defraying expenses incurred in regulating immigration. The law further established that arriving passengers would be screened and that anyone deemed a convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge would not be allowed to land.

THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT OF 1882 suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years but allowed Chinese who were in the United States as of November 17, 1880 to remain. It paved the way for a series of laws passed between 1882 and 1904 that severely restricted Chinese immigration flows and provided for the deportation of many Chinese nationals residing in the United States. Those measures were repealed in 1943.

THE 1924 NATIONAL ORIGINS ACT (Johnson-Reed Act) established immigration quotas, calculated at 2 percent of each nationality’s total foreign-born population in the United States in 1890, as indicated in the 1890 census. The law sharply limited admissions of southern and eastern Europeans, who had arrived in largest numbers after 1890. Students, nationals of Western Hemisphere countries, members of certain professions, and the wives and minor children of U.S. citizens were exempt from the quotas.

THE 1942 BRACERO AGREEMENT allowed Mexican nationals to enter the United States as temporary agricultural workers. The agreement, extended in 1949 and 1951, required U.S. employers to pay the transportation and living expenses of Mexican laborers, and to pay them wages equal to those of American farmworkers doing similar work. The agreement was repealed in 1964.

Source: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/timeline-1790.

THE 1952 IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT (McCarren-Walter Act) preserved the national-origins quota system, but updated the way in which the quota is calculated. For the first time, Asian nations were assigned quotas allowing their nationals to immigrate to the United States. The law also established that U.S. consular officers would screen foreign nationals for admissibility to the United States.

THE 1965 IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT (Hart-Celler Act) abolished the 1924 national-origins quota system and replaced it with a system whereby immigrants are admitted based on family relationships to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, or to relationships to a U.S. employer. While caps were placed on the total number of immigrants admitted each year in most family-based and employer-based categories, the law provided no cap on the number of immediate relatives (spouses, parents, and minor children) of U.S. citizens admitted each year. Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere countries were also exempted from the system of preference categories for admissions. However, the law created a 130,000 cap, beginning in 1968, on the total number of permanent residents who could be admitted from the Western Hemisphere (previously there was no such cap).

THE 1986 IMMIGRATION REFORM AND CONTROL ACT (IRCA) provided for a 50 percent increase in Border Patrol staffing and imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hired or recruited unauthorized immigrants. IRCA also created two legalization programs. One allowed unauthorized aliens who had lived in the United States. since 1982 to regularize their status; the other permitted people who had worked for at least 90 days in certain agricultural jobs to apply for legal permanent resident status. Under these programs, about 2.7 million people who were illegally residing in the United States got legal status.

THE 1990 IMMIGRATION ACT raised legal admissions to 50 percent above the pre-IRCA level (mainly for employment-based immigrants), eased controls on temporary workers, and limited the power to deport immigrants for ideological reasons. It also eliminated discretionary relief for certain aggravated felonies and abolished judicial discretion to grant relief from deportation for criminal offenders.

THE 1996 ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION REFORM AND IMMIGRANT RESPONSIBILITY ACT (IIRAIRA) added new grounds of inadmissibility and deportability, expanded the list of crimes constituting an aggravated felony, created expedited removal procedures, and reduced the scope of judicial review of immigration decisions. The law expanded mandatory detention of immigrants in standard removal proceedings if they had previously been convicted of certain criminal offenses. It also increased the number of Border Patrol agents, introduced new border control measures, reduced government benefits available to immigrants (as did the welfare reform law enacted the same year), increased penalties for unauthorized immigrants, toughened procedural requirements for asylum seekers and other immigrants, mandated an entry-exit system to monitor both arrivals and departures of immigrants, and established a pilot program in which employers and social service agencies could check by telephone or electronically to verify the eligibility of immigrants. It also established a statutory framework for subsequent actions by states and localities, known as 287(g) programs, to take on immigration law enforcement roles that had traditionally been exercised solely by federal immigration enforcement agencies.

THE 2002 HOMELAND SECURITY ACT created the Department of Homeland Security. In 2003 the functions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—the Department of Justice agency responsible for provision of immigration services, border enforcement, and border inspection—were transferred to DHS and restructured to become three new agencies: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

All of this changed with the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act amid the nativist upsurge sparked by World War I and the Russian Revolution. One of the legislators for whom the law was named, Albert Johnson, who chaired the Immigration Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, was an active Ku Klux Klan member. Immigration restriction was at the top of the KKK’s political agenda in the 1920s, reflecting the organization’s strident anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. The 1924 law that the Klan helped pass created national-origins quotas favoring western and northern Europeans and dramatically limiting admissions of eastern and southern Europeans—most of whom were Jews or Catholics, widely viewed not only by the Klan but also by many U.S.-born Protestants as racial and political others at the time. The new quotas were determined by each nationality’s share of the U.S. population in 1890, just before the massive surge of southern and eastern European immigration had taken off. The 1924 law also effectively barred Japanese from entry (Chinese immigration was already illegal); later it served as a formidable barrier to entry for refugees from Nazism seeking safety in the United States.⁶

As intended, the Johnson-Reed Act slowed new immigration to a trickle. Six years after its passage, the stock market crash and the ensuing surge of unemployment largely eliminated the economic incentive to migrate to the United States as well. Against that background, nativism faded in the New Deal era, especially during and after World War II, when Jews and Catholics were gradually incorporated into the mainstream of American society and came to be seen as white. That paved the way forward for political efforts to eliminate the discriminatory national-origins quotas established in 1924, which had become anachronistic. After a series of false starts, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, ending the quotas and replacing them with a system that prioritized family reunification and employment needs. This legislation was part of the wave of progressive reforms—including landmark civil rights laws, Medicare, and other Great Society programs—that followed Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 electoral victory.

Widely heralded at the time as an anti-discrimination measure, in retrospect the Hart-Celler Act’s more notable effect was paving the way for the dramatic increase in immigration shown in Figure 1. The law capped overall legal immigration at 290,000 people per year, with no more than 20,000 from any single country. But admissions soon rose well above that level, as key categories were exempted from the cap and/or authorized by subsequent legislation. The largest such category comprised the immediate family members of U.S. citizens (including naturalized citizens) or legal permanent residents (LPRs). Refugees were also exempt from the cap on total immigration, as were certain types of skilled workers. The cumulative significance of these various exemptions can be seen in data for the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2017 (before the Trump administration’s immigration policies had a significant impact). That year more than a million immigrants became LPRs. Two-thirds of them were family members of U.S. citizens or family members of LPRs, 13 percent were refugees and asylees, 12 percent gained LPR status through employment-based preferences, and 5 percent received that status through diversity visas under a program created in 1990.⁷

To be sure, the historical fluctuations shown in Figure 1 reflect not only changes in the law, but also economic and social forces. The primary economic driver of immigration has always been labor demand. In this respect immigrants are distinctly different from refugees fleeing war, natural disasters, political persecution, or discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Refugee flows have grown over recent decades (except under Trump) and will likely expand further with climate change, although historically immigrants have greatly outnumbered refugees. For both groups, push factors (some of them results of U.S. foreign policy) explain why migration flows originate in one part of the world rather than another. In contrast, pull factors—most importantly labor demand, but also social networks, and especially the presence of family members in the destination country—explain why immigrants are drawn to specific locations. In the past as in the present, few undertake the arduous journey from their country of birth to a new one unless they are in urgent need of refuge from a life-threatening situation or are confident that they can secure a better livelihood on arrival in their chosen destination.

The Browning of America and the Unintended Consequences of Immigration Law and Policy

The political leaders who crafted the 1965 Hart-Celler Act did not anticipate the surge in immigration it unleashed. After he signed the bill at a ceremony in front of the Statue of Liberty, President Johnson confidently declared that it will not reshape the structure of our daily lives. He was deeply mistaken, however. Not only did the overall volume of immigration rise sharply soon afterward, but the new law also became a key driver of the browning of America, as most of those who arrived after its enactment hailed from Asia and Latin America. This too was an entirely unexpected development. Attorney General Robert Kennedy predicted an influx of about 5,000 immigrants from Asia during the first year after the 1965 law took effect, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear. Instead, starting in the 1970s, Asian immigration spiked upward, and has accelerated ever since (see Figure 3).⁸

Perhaps even more surprising to those who crafted the Hart-Celler Act was the huge increase in migration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America that followed its passage. The law actually limited admissions from the Western Hemisphere for the first time in U.S. history, with a cap of 120,000 per year (included in the overall cap of 290,000 per year). This provision was added to the Hart-Celler Act in an eleventh-hour political compromise, with the intent of restricting immigration across the nation’s southern border. Instead it had precisely the opposite effect.

Figure 3: U.S. Immigrant Population by World Region of Birth, 1960–2018.

Source: Migration Policy Institute, www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/regions-immigrant-birth-1960-present.

A year before passing the Hart-Celler Act, Congress had ended the bracero program, which had been exposed as highly abusive. Originally launched amid the labor shortages of World War II, the program had allowed Mexicans to legally enter the country on a temporary basis as agricultural guest workers. It was abolished in 1964, and yet agribusiness demand for low-wage labor continued unabated. As a result, the introduction of the new cap on legal admissions from the Western Hemisphere in the 1965 immigration law rapidly generated a precipitous rise in unauthorized entry across the southern border by migrant farmworkers who could no longer become braceros. At first, like the bracero program, this was a largely circular migration of single male workers, most of whom returned to Mexico after each harvest. But then a wholly unintended vicious cycle emerged: as U.S. border enforcement ramped up in response to the growth of the unauthorized immigrant population, crossing the border became more expensive for Mexican farmworkers, and circular migration was increasingly replaced by permanent settlement in El Norte. In the 1980s, another influx across the southern border developed among Central American refugees fleeing civil wars—wars in which the United States played a significant role.

Latinx immigrants ultimately gained a foothold not only in agriculture but also in urban labor markets, where they found construction, manufacturing, and service jobs. As demand for low-wage labor surged with de-unionization and labor degradation from the late 1970s on, the unauthorized population continued to grow. That in turn led to the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which like the 1965 law proved to have vast unintended consequences. IRCA’s main goal, as its name implies, was to control unauthorized immigration. To that end, it provided amnesty to undocumented immigrants who had been present in the country prior to January 1, 1982 (not coincidentally excluding the many Central American refugees who arrived after that date), while simultaneously tightening border enforcement to prevent a new influx. Once again, the militarization of the border—which was ramped up even further in subsequent legislation—led more and more unauthorized immigrants to abandon circular migration in favor of permanent settlement. Many also arranged for family members to join them, often without authorization. As a result, the unauthorized population mushroomed after IRCA, peaking at 12 million in 2007, when the collapse of labor demand due to the Great Recession brought the influx to a sudden halt.⁹

The Modern Immigrant Rights Movement

Each wave of immigration has spawned new civic organizations attending to the practical needs of newcomers and their U.S.-born children. A century ago these included ethnic and religious groups, labor unions, and the famous settlement houses of the Progressive Era. The post-1965 wave of immigration replicated that same pattern, especially after the passage of IRCA in 1986. In the nation’s large urban centers, where the foreign-born population was most concentrated, the amnesty created by that law spurred advocates and organizers to ramp up efforts to help undocumented residents adjust their status—efforts that gradually evolved into the contemporary immigrant rights movement.¹⁰

That movement, which included organizations that provided direct social and legal services to immigrants as well as those engaged in public policy advocacy and organizing, expanded further in response to a series of anti-immigrant threats. California voters approved Proposition 187 in 1994, with the intent of denying access to public social services to undocumented immigrants, including public schooling for children. Although it was soon struck down in the courts, Prop 187 led to widespread mobilization among immigrants in California, then home to the nation’s largest undocumented population. Two years later the U.S. Congress passed two highly punitive laws (see Figure 2) that restricted immigrants’ access to public benefits and increased penalties for immigration violations. These measures also profoundly shaped the immigrant rights movement, sparking an explosion of efforts by community-based groups, service organizations, multi-racial community organizations, unions, worker centers, and immigrant rights coalitions to ameliorate the harms. Mirroring the geographical dispersion of immigration beyond the traditional destination states of New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Florida to the rest of the country, the movement also spread increasingly to new destinations, and a grassroots movement for amnesty—later termed legalization—began to crystallize, despite the fact that many establishment organizations and politicians initially dismissed it as hopelessly impractical.

Immigrant organizing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has taken a wide variety of forms. Ethnically specific groups such as Mexican and Central American hometown associations, as well as multi-ethnic coalitions among Latinx, Asian, African, and sometimes even European immigrants, burgeoned in the 1980s and 1990s. In the same period, the Catholic Church and other religious bodies whose congregations included growing numbers of immigrants became increasingly engaged in both service provision and immigrant rights advocacy. A vibrant ethnic media infrastructure of radio stations, TV networks, and newspapers developed to meet the needs of the growing community, amplifying the voices of immigrant rights advocates. Traditional labor unions in sectors such as building services and construction began recruiting immigrant workers into their ranks in the 1980s and 1990s as well, giving the movement a huge boost and sparking the AFL-CIO’s historic decision in 2000 to reverse its historically anti-immigrant position. In the same period, non-union organizations known as worker centers began to organize immigrants outside the boundaries of the traditional labor movement, including day laborers, domestic workers, taxi drivers, and restaurant workers.¹¹

The immigrant rights movement experienced a major setback after the attacks of September 11, 2001, unleashed a virulent wave of xenophobia, crushing hopes that had been raised shortly beforehand by talks between U.S. president George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox about a path to legalization for the (predominantly Mexican) undocumented. As that prospect dimmed, the movement increasingly shifted its focus to local and state issues such as access to in-state college tuition and driver’s licenses for undocumented residents. In the early 2000s, immigrant rights organizations sponsored the first leadership trainings of a new generation of immigrant youth activists—giving rise to the politically potent Dreamers, who later gave the larger movement an intersectional thrust.¹²

The quest for immigrant rights burst into national consciousness in 2006, when cities across the country witnessed marches of millions of people. This massive mobilization was sparked by legislation sponsored by House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Sensenbrenner and passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in late 2005. H.R. 4437 never became law, but proposed to criminalize undocumented immigrants as felons, along with anyone who offered them assistance. All the institutions that had begun to support immigrant rights in the preceding years—from community-based organizations to churches to unions—responded in force. Their call to action was amplified by Latinx radio DJs and the wider ethnic media. Protesters poured into the streets, carrying signs saying We Are America and Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote.¹³

The 2006 marches were followed by a less visible but highly effective campaign to encourage eligible immigrants to become naturalized U.S. citizens and to register as voters. That effort soon transformed the political landscape, especially in immigrant-rich California. At the same time, at the national level reformers mobilized a major push for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), a sprawling grand bargain that aimed to unify a wide variety of interest groups—those fighting for the 11 million undocumented, the Dreamers, labor unions with large immigrant memberships, employers in low-wage or high-skill sectors seeking more access to labor, and constituencies advocating increased family-based migration and expanded admission of refugees and asylees. CIR was proposed in various iterations: in the talks between Presidents Bush and Fox in 2001, and in legislation sponsored by Senators Kennedy and McCain that passed in the Senate (but not the House) in 2006 and then passed in the House (but not the Senate) in 2007. With the support of President Obama, a bipartisan Gang of Eight reintroduced CIR proposals in 2013 and 2014, when a bill passed the Senate with sixty-eight votes but never came to a vote in the Republican-controlled House.

Substantively, the various CIR proposals combined provisions for a path to legalization for the undocumented, changes to the