If congressional Republicans’ plans come to fruition before the end of the year, the migrant community will receive one of the most unpleasant Christmas “gifts” in recent history.
This is the bill HR 5283, which has been used by Republicans as a spearhead in their closed-door negotiations with Democrats, as a condition for releasing the emergency aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Rejected by dozens of community organizations, the initiative prohibits the use of federal funds for temporary shelters, which would stop funding the asylum process for hundreds of thousands of migrants a year, in addition to cutting entry permits through the process of parole, that is, humanitarian conditional release.
That Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate want to toughen immigration policy is not breaking news. After all, this is the same party that never spoke out against the cruel policies of the Trump era, such as the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border. Hundreds of children are still unable to reunite with their mothers.
What is surprising is that, faced with the inability to approve crucial aid to Ukraine, at a critical moment in the war with Russia, President Joe Biden seemed to fold his hands. “I am willing to make important concessions on the border. We need to fix the broken border system,” he said.
That Biden gives in to pressure from Republicans is also not new. As a senator from Delaware he became accustomed to turning politics into the art of the possible. In a polarizing environment, someone has to fold their hands. In this case, it seems that he will be the president of the United States, in order to rescue aid to Ukraine.
But doing it on the backs of the most vulnerable beings in society, the migrants seeking asylum, seems absurd to me.
The good news is that a growing number of Democratic lawmakers, including members of the Hispanic Caucus and veteran senators such as Alex Padilla, Bob Menendez, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, Tim Kaine and others, do not appear willing to let Biden go free.
“Using a spending package to enact these unrelated permanent policy changes creates a dangerous precedent and risks aid to our international partners,” 10 Democratic senators warned in a letter. “If the expectation is that we are going to compromise on a future humanitarian parole program, that is not going to happen,” Senator Kaine said separately.
Nothing is set in stone in budget negotiations. Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. And the Democrats’ veiled threat is a sign that a tough and radical immigration proposal will have difficulty passing in the Senate.
Congratulations on the system of checks and balances of American democracy. Unfortunately, we continue to witness the spectacle of a dysfunctional political class that continues to put band-aids on a patient (the immigration system) in the intensive care unit. Or even worse, prescribing a poison pill and not an effective remedy.
If you are concerned about the state of affairs in the United States regarding this and other issues, call or write your district representative or senator and tell them what you think. In the case of the president, that opinion will be heard with the Hispanic vote next November.
