The White House and the Democrats are at loggerheads over President Donald Trump’s immigration reform framework, that promotes merit-based immigration and proposes scrapping the present family-based “chain migration” system, casting doubts on a bipartisan legislative package.
Democrats, who greeted Trump’s announcement with boos during the State of the Union address, see in the plan to end chain migration a sinister design to drastically curtail the overall legal immigration level, considering that family-based immigration has accounted for nearly 70 per cent of all legal immigration to the US over decades.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused the President of holding the nearly 2 million Dreamers “hostage to the most extreme anti-immigrant agenda in generations”.
Pramila Jayapal, the Democratic Congresswoman from Seattle, denounced Trump’s plan for tying protection for Dreamers with ending “chain migration” and the diversity visa lottery programme. “He proposes protecting 1.8 million Dreamers in exchange for cutting legal immigration in half and not allowing US citizens and permanent residents to bring their parents or adult children into the country,” Jayapal said.
The White House, on the other hand, stoutly defended the proposed switch to a merit-based system that would “properly match the needs of the modern United States economy and protect vulnerable blue-collar American workers”.
A White House statement on Monday said “the flood of low-skilled immigrants into the United States has suppressed wages, harmed American workers, and strained federal resources”. It said other advanced countries like Canada and Australia also use a merit-based system that benefits both the immigrants and those nations.
In justification of the push to end “chain migration”, the White House said that under the current law, a single immigrant is able to sponsor numerous relatives, including relatives beyond their nuclear family.
“Each family member of the principal immigrant who comes to the United States as a permanent resident can, in turn, sponsor relatives beyond his or her own nuclear family,” it said, adding: “The result is that a single immigrant may create a pathway for the migration of far-extended family members, or extended-family chain migration.”
“Between 2005 and 2015, the United States admitted 9.3 million immigrants based on family relations,” the White House statement said, concurring with the view that nearly 70 per cent of legal immigration into the United States is based on family relations.