Securing America ' s Future Act Is a Net Negative for the Immigration System

President Trumpis backing the Securing America ’s Future (SAF) Act drafted by key House Republicans. The SAF Act is a comprehensive immigration reform bill posing as a DACA fix. It is414 pages long and touches on every major area of the immigration system —family, employment, and diversity legal immigration, humanitarian programs, workplace enforcement, temporary visas, interior enforcement, border security, criminal penalties, and much else. Comprehensive immigration reform is fine, but this massive, complex bill expands the scope of the debate so far from DACA that it cannot seriously be considered an answer to this relatively small immigration issue.In any case, SAF ’s negative provisions outweigh its positive ones. The good leaves much to be desired, and the bad is about as bad as it gets.Positive ProvisionsDACA recipients receive a nonimmigrant status that can be renewed indefinitely (p. 384). The failure to grant them permanent residency with a pathway to citizenship refuses to recognize them for what they are: Americans. But it is still better than theSenate Republican proposal that would grant just a three-year visa that is not renewable, and SAF would also allow them to adjust to permanent residency if sponsored by an employer. This is good, but because the bill does nothing aboutthe per-country limits, sponsorship will just end up creating a huge backlog for green cards for Mexican workers, like the H-1Bhas for Indian workers.  The bill also fails to allow le...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs