Monday Immigration Brief: Backlog Rallies for Eagle

Hello, readers! Here’s your Monday afternoon immigration news bulletin, delivered an hour early —

Eagle Act Rally Planned for Bay Area

Advocates for green card backlog relief are planning a rally in support of the Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment Act of 2022 (Eagle Act) on Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area. CA4Freedom is behind the organizing action, most of which is happening on LinkedIn and Discord.

Green card backloggers typically operate in anonymity, but their stories are harrowing in a rising ride of press coverage.  San Francisco is an interesting location for the rally because tech companies have a lot to lose if the existing 7% per-country cap on green cards were phased out.

Immigrant workers sponsored on employment-based visas are vulnerable to the businesses that hire them. They also face high barriers to entry into the American employment market where they cannot legally check the citizen box on job applications.

The Eagle Act does not create any new green cards, a distinction advocates hope is not lost on Capitol lawmakers in the upcoming lame duck session. Instead, the bill eliminates the employment-based cap altogether and increases the family-based cap from 7 to 15 percent.  Immigration Voice is an advocacy group at the forefront of pushing Congress to pass the Eagle Act.

The bill was introduced last year by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Lofgren has been legislating for her Silicon Valley constituents since she introduced a bill to remove per-country caps in 2007. It now has 83 House cosponsors, including eight Republicans. In July, Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO) reintroduced the Eagle Act in the upper chamber where it currently has four cosponsors: two Democrats and two Republicans.

In the last Congress (116th), the bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent, which makes it hard to know for certain if it would have 60 votes to pass in this lame duck. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said repeatedly that he will not support the Eagle Act as it is currently written. The irony of Durbin’s position on the Eagle Act is that he once supported the exact same bill. In fact, Durbin helped negotiate the current version of the Eagle Act.

“To help the people from India at the expense of everyone else is their solution,” Durbin told me in June. “You can imagine everyone else has a different opinion so we’re trying to find some middle ground. The clear solution is more green cards so they don’t have to wait 25 years.”

Indian visa immigrants have the most to gain from Eagle Act. Roughly 75% of temporary H1-B visas currently go to immigrants from India, which means Indians have the longest green card queue, a growing backlog of immigrant workers and their families that can’t be cleared due to the per-country cap.

Without Durbin onboard, Eagle Act is likely dead in the Senate during this Congress. Rolling the bill into a larger immigration package that includes the GOP’s asylum restrictions would almost surely be stymied by Latino caucus Senators like Bob Menendez (NJ) and other Senate Democrats, leaving little room for negotiating a deal.

Could the Eagle Act pass the Senate if brought to the floor? Yes, insist advocates, pointing to the overwhelming support it had in the last Congress; but with only four Senate cosponsors, an actual vote count is elusive. Not impossible though, which is why advocates online are rallying in the Bay Area on Sunday.

The Eagle Act is one one of several possible inflection points of elusive immigrant relief in the 117th Congress that I will continue to cover here on Patreon and Twitter.. Meanwhile, if you are attending the Bay Area rally, please let me know for this week’s bulletins…

DHS in Disarray … ?

POLITICO reports that Department of Homeland Security insiders are not happy with Chris Magnus, Joe Biden’s Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The story by Daniel Lippman was quickly picked up in right-wing media and tweeted by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

“In any organization, some people are threatened by this,” Magnus told POLITICO of his approach to reform at CBP. “They don’t like it when someone questions ‘why’ certain things must be done the way they’ve always been done. I’m not here to back down to the predictable challenges from those people.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sources were particularly unhappy with Magnus, but the story is unlikely to shake Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ faith in the 61-year-old former police chief. The sprawling government agency Mayorkas oversees includes immigration agencies like ICE, CBP, USCIS, plus other federal law enforcement entities like the Secret Service.

The infighting at DHS evident in today’s reporting is not unusual as the internal politics of making any changes at the agency have always been fraught with off-message bickering online and in the press. Secretary Mayorkas was bound to be a reformer after the agency’s excesses of the Trump administration; though most immigrant relief advocates I’ve spoken with say too many Trump-era policies remain in place.

Is Stephen Miller’s restrictionist agenda the new normal on the White House immigration portfolio? Not necessarily. Presidents have a lot of unilateral discretion over immigration policy, as Trump/Miller proved through four years of historically cataclysmic policies.

Where Obama was slow to move on immigrant relief a decade ago, Biden has tried a myriad of policy changes that have been held up in court by restrictionist judges. Rumors have been circulating in the press about possible executive action on immigration after the midterm. This seems likely, though the devil will be in the details.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching this space on Patreon and Twitter…

Bittersweet Video …

Reuters tweeted a tearjerker video on Saturday of families reuniting under close supervision over the Rio Grande. The #HugsNotWalls initiative is based on a similar event along the U.S. - Mexico border in 2018.

News Clips

• “Migrants Targeted in Canadian Immigration Scam on Facebook” - THE GUARDIAN
• “Republicans bank on tough immigration line as U.S. midterms near” - AL JAZEERA
• “Migrants in New York Are Grateful for Help. But They Want to Work.” - NYT
• “As Immigration Issue Looms, Biden Turns Eye to Latin America” - NYT

Thanks for reading! Please email or tweet me your immigration news tips. If you find value here, consider subscribing (if you don’t already). Back Wednesday with another immigration news bulletin.