Immigration reform 101: How does Senate plan address four big questions?

After months of closed-door negotiations, the Senate’s bipartisan “Gang of Eight” offered a legislative summary of its proposal for comprehensive immigration reform. Here is how the Senate gang handled the four hottest immigration flashpoints.

2. Undocumented immigrants in the US

Ross D. Franklin/AP/File
Arizona Dream Act Coalition staff members, among others, line up for guidance about President Obama's deferred action immigration program last year.

America’s roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants will have a chance to become citizens, but will have to wait for the border security measures noted above to be instituted before they can complete a decade-plus-long process.

The exceptions to this are young, undocumented immigrants known as DREAMers (after previous legislation that would have offered them a special route to citizenship), as well as some agricultural workers. Both would have a streamlined path to citizenship, with the wait for DREAMers being five years.

Everyone else, however, would apply for “registered prospective immigrant” status by passing a background check and paying a $500 fine alongside assessed taxes. That status would be good for six years but could not be obtained before DHS submits its two border security plans to Congress. RPI status would give the newly-documented the ability to travel internationally and work in the US and be renewed for another $500.

After 10 years as an RPI, immigrants could apply to become green card holders through a new immigration category (see item No. 3) if they meet several criteria:

  • Continuous presence and employment in the United States over that decade.
  • Up-to-date tax payments.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of US civics and English.
  • Payment of a $1,000 fine.

In addition, all individuals who are waiting for green cards when the bill is enacted will have to have been processed through the immigration system before RPIs get green cards. That means those in the country illegally today would have gone to the “back of the line.”

After five years with a green card, these immigrants would be able to apply for US citizenship, meaning the first bloc of potential US citizens beyond DREAMers and agriculture workers would take their oaths just before 2030.  

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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