Democrats are pushing a comprehensive approach to immigration reform — for now.
Democrats in Congress introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill on Thursday crafted around the priorities President Joe Biden articulated on his first day in office, including a path to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
If passed, the long-anticipated bill, known as the US Citizenship Act of 2021, would mark the most sweeping reform of the US immigration system since 1986 — and would be a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s nativist agenda.
But it’s unlikely that the legislation, which is a kind of mission statement for the Democratic Party on immigration, will attract the 10 Republican votes needed to proceed in the Senate — unless Democrats eliminate or alter the filibuster in such a way that could allow them to pass the bill without a single Republican vote.
The centerpiece of the bill is an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US prior to January 1, 2021. It also includes provisions that would address the underlying causes of migration, expand the number of available visas and green cards, invest in technology and infrastructure at ports of entry on the border, remove obstacles to asylum, and shore up protections for immigrant workers.
Noticeably absent from the bill are provisions that would promote the kind of border security and interior enforcement measures that Republicans have long sought. For example, previous Republican proposals would have boosted funding for the construction of the border wall, made it a crime to be present in the US without authorization, and required children to be indefinitely detained together with their parents while they faced deportation proceedings.
Some Republicans have already warned the bill would “return to the radical left-wing policies that will incentivize illegal immigration and promote an unending flood of foreign nationals into the United States.”
But Democrats have so far been reluctant to say they are willing to bargain with Republicans on beefing up border security beyond modernizing ports of entry or narrowing the bill’s legalization provisions.
Sen. Bob Menendez, the lead co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate, said in a press call Thursday that the reason comprehensive immigration reform has failed time and time again over the last two decades is because Democrats have “capitulated too quickly to fringe voices who have refused to accept the humanity and contributions of immigrants to our country and dismiss everything … as amnesty.”
“We know the path forward will demand negotiations with others. But we’re not going to make concessions out of the gate,” Menendez said. “We will never win an argument that we don’t have the courage to make.”
California Rep. Linda Sánchez, who introduced a companion bill in the House on Thursday, also warned during the call that “cynicism can defeat us before we even try.”
Though advocates have expressed openness to starting out with smaller bills that might gain traction more easily — such as those legalizing DREAMers who came to the US as children, as well as farmworkers and other essential workers — Democrats are currently prioritizing comprehensive reform. In a call with reporters Wednesday, a senior administration official didn’t rule out the possibility that Democrats could also pursue piecemeal legislation, but said fixing the entire immigration system was imperative.
Practical considerations about the bill’s prospects have nevertheless continued to plague advocates who are simply trying to get relief for as many people as quickly as possible after four years of their communities living under siege.
“Even as I read and dissect this bill, the only question in my mind is HOW? Not just what. What’s the strategy?” Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer at the immigrant rights group RAICES, tweeted. “How are Democrats planning to keep their promises to the immigrant community? Because I can assure you, the party of Trump won’t do anything good for us.”
The bill would implement reforms to legal immigration
The centerpiece of the bill is a provision that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status and, eventually, citizenship.
The process would take at least eight years. To qualify, immigrants would have had to be physically present in the US on or before January 1, 2021, unless granted a waiver on humanitarian grounds.
Initially, immigrants would be able to obtain a work permit and travel abroad with the assurance that they would be permitted to reenter the US. After five years, they could apply for a green card if they pass background checks and pay taxes. Immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Temporary Protected Status, as well as farmworkers, would be able to apply for green cards immediately, however.
After holding their green card for three years and passing additional background checks, they could apply for US citizenship.
The impact of such legislation cannot be overestimated: It could potentially bring millions of people out of the shadows.
“For all of them, the broken immigration system stands in their way of being recognized for who they already are: important members of our communities,” Maria Praeli, government relations manager at the immigrant advocacy group FWD.us, said in a press call.
Among other reforms to the legal immigration system, the bill notably includes a provision to prevent presidents from issuing categorial bans on immigration. It would also remove barriers to family-based immigration, including lengthy visa backlogs and employment-based green cards, which have been relatively inaccessible for workers in lower-wage industries.
It would repeal Clinton-era restrictions that prevent people who have been present in the US without authorization for more than six months from reentering the country for a period of three to 10 years. Many of those immigrants would otherwise be eligible to apply for legal status, often through a US citizen or a spouse who holds a green card.
It would also strengthen protections for immigrant workers by helping to ensure that victims of serious labor violations receive visas, protecting those who face workplace retaliation from deportation, and setting up a commission to make improvements to the employment verification process.
In addition to substantive changes to the legal immigration system, the bill would also introduce rhetorical changes, substituting “noncitizen” for the word “alien” in federal immigration laws.
The bill seeks to address the underlying causes of migration
The bill aims to bring to fruition Biden’s vision for a regional approach to migration, addressing the factors that drive Central American migrants to flee their home countries.
As vice president, Biden developed a $750 million program in tandem with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — Central America’s Northern Triangle countries — aimed at improving economic development and curbing violence and corruption in the region, but the Trump administration halted that effort in March 2019.
The new bill builds on that concept, allocating $4 billion over the course of four years to address those push factors and incentivize Northern Triangle governments to improve living conditions.
It would also set up new processing centers throughout the region to register qualifying migrants as refugees and resettle them in the US. And it would reunify separated families by reinstituting the Central American Minors program — under which children can join their relatives in the US — and creating a new parole program for those whose family members in the US sponsored them for a visa.
The bill also seeks to improve the capacity of Central American countries to process and protect asylum seekers and refugees by working with the United Nations and other nongovernmental organizations.
The proposal appears to be substantially differently from the agreements the Trump administration brokered with the Northern Triangle countries, which allowed the US to return asylum seekers to those countries to seek protections — agreements Biden has vowed to terminate. The bill does not create any kind of obligation for asylum seekers to seek protection outside the US, but would instead aim to ensure migrants have due process and information about their rights, in addition to being properly screened and given documentation that allows them to move freely and access social services.
The bill could boost funding for immigration enforcement with a focus on technology
The bill would allow for an unspecified increase in funding for immigration enforcement. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would have to assess the precise dollar amount required, but that could prove controversial, given that many immigrant advocates have spent the last four years calling for lawmakers to abolish or at least defund the immigration enforcement agencies, whose budgets ballooned under Trump.
Those funds would go toward improving screening technology, officer training, infrastructure at ports of entry, and border security between ports of entry, favoring alternatives to a border wall.
The bill would also establish mechanisms to address misconduct among DHS’s ranks, increasing staff at the DHS Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates such cases, and requiring the agency to create a use-of-force policy. It would be a critical first step in reforming the agency, which became politicized under Trump, at times acting as the mouthpiece of his immigration and “law and order” agenda.
It would also enhance penalties for criminal gangs and drug traffickers.
NASA’s Perseverance mission, explained.
Touchdown! The planet Mars has a new robot resident.
At 3:55 pm Eastern time Thursday, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed safely on the Red Planet, after its seven-month journey through space. Upon arrival, it snapped this image of its landing spot. You can see the shadow of the craft imposed on the Martian dust.
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NASA
The safe landing came after what was called the “seven minutes of terror” landing sequence. Because it takes several minutes for any communication from Mars to reach Earth, NASA’s team could not pilot the rover’s landing. So Perseverance had to land itself, without any guidance from humans.
Why was this so terrifying? Simply: NASA couldn’t know if the rover had landed safely for those seven minutes.
But it did. And soon, it will be time for the rover to get to work.
Previous rover missions were after one big question: Was Mars ever hospitable to life? They found that it was, with water once on the surface and organic chemicals in the environment.
Perseverance is going to go for the next big question: Is there evidence of actual microbial life, frozen in time on the Martian surface?
“This Mars mission is going to be the first mission to actually go and directly search for past evidence of life on Mars,” Philip Twu, a robotics engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped design Perseverance’s autonomous driving system, told me in July.
This is stuff scientists dream about answering as kids. And now, thanks to this latest mission, they have a good shot at it.
Meet Perseverance. It’s like NASA’s Curiosity Rover, but upgraded.
The Perseverance rover will look familiar to many.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s modeled after the Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012. Like a new-model-year car, Perseverance comes with many upgrades: It can travel faster, farther, and around more obstacles on the Martian surface than Curiosity can. It has improved autonomous driving and more resilient wheels. It has a drone helicopter aboard (called Ingenuity), which will become the first of its kind to fly on another planet (this is more of a technology demonstration than a main mission tool).
It even has an experiment designed to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, as a proof of concept for future rocket fuel factories on the planet.
And like any new piece of engineering these days, it comes with more cameras than the previous model: 23, compared to Curiosity’s 17.
But perhaps most important are the rover’s power tools: Perseverance is going to drill into an ancient river delta on Mars and collect rock samples that may contain evidence of ancient life. Even more audacious is the follow-up plan: A future mission will recover those samples from Mars and return them to Earth.
“Seven minutes of terror”
To find out the answer to that epic question — did Mars ever have life? — first, Perseverance had to travel through space for seven months to reach the Red Planet.
Upon arrival to Mars Thursday, it had to repeat an exceedingly tricky landing first achieved by Curiosity. The rover and all its gizmos are too heavy to land on the planet via parachutes alone. (Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s to begin with, so parachutes are less effective there.) It has to be slowed down with a powered (rocket) descent.
When Perseverance was just above the surface, the 2,260-pound rover was lowered gently from the rocket via what NASA’s engineers call a “sky crane.”
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
This whole feat was made more impressive by the fact that Perseverance had to land itself. Mars is far enough away from Earth that any radio signal we send the rover takes seven minutes to reach Mars. That means there was no piloting Perseverance in real time. It had to slow itself from around 12,000 mph to zero, all while choosing an unobstructed place to land.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
Even though Curiosity pulled off this feat in 2012, “our hearts will still be beating hard when we get to that point of the mission,” Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Perseverance, told reporters before the mission launched. This was the most dangerous part of the whole mission, and the point at which it could have failed catastrophically. Once the landing sequence started, NASA had no control over the craft.
(Unlike Curiosity, Perseverance was able to film its landing, which the public will be able to see at a later date. That will be rad.)
Looking for signs of ancient life
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater, a dried-up ancient lake bed. Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, which is an ancient river delta. The terrain there is a little more treacherous than Gale, but the rewards may be richer.
“It’s going to be a lot more rocks, it’s going to be a lot more cliffs, there’s going to be a lot more things that are going to really require a rover to be able to be a lot smarter in the way it drives,” Twu said. It all has to work perfectly: If the rover gets stuck or breaks a wheel, there’s no Martian equivalent of AAA to tow it.
As with any Mars mission, many technical malfunctions are possible. Last year, for instance, a heat probe on NASA’s Mars Insight lander got unexpectedly stuck while drilling into the ground.
But the risk will be worth it. “If life ever did exist on Mars, this is the kind of place where that evidence would be preserved,” Lori Glaze, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, told Vox in July.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL
That’s because the crater is home to a 3.4 billion-year-old dried-up river delta. You can see its shape in the image above. This is an ideal place to look for signs of past life, Tanja Bosak, an MIT geobiologist working on the Perseverance mission, said.
In a river bed, “there are a lot of clay minerals, and as they settle, they can really just kind of smother anything organic, or they can even absorb organic molecules,” she says. That is: In the ancient dried clay of the delta, there may be microscopic fossils of microbial life, or geological patterns indicative of life. (Typically, Bosak studies how microorganisms alter rocks on Earth. The research she and her colleagues are doing in this area will provide the basis for what rocks to look out for on Mars.)
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
Once settled in the delta, Perseverance will use its cameras and various chemical sensors to find the rocks most likely to contain this evidence. (One of the sensors is called SHERLOC, short for “Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.”) Scientists here on Earth will analyze that data and choose several dozen samples for the rover to drill into. Then the samples will be stored in special tubes inside the rover, where they’ll be undisturbed.
The most audacious plan, though, is to come. A future mission — whose date is not yet determined — called the Mars sample return will send a new rover to Mars to collect the samples from a drop-off point and then launch those back to Earth on a small rocket.
What type of life might scientists find?
Once back on Earth, scientists can study the samples extremely precisely and determine whether they contain signs of ancient life.
They’re not expecting anything more than microbes — bacteria-like, or other single-celled organisms. This is not a mission to find little green men.
But it’s still exciting. “These [Martian] rocks are older, by half a billion or a billion years, than anything that’s well preserved that we have on Earth,” Bosak says. Which means we might not only find life on Mars but a form of life older and more primordial than any previously observed on Earth. We can’t even ask “what life was like on Earth at that time,” she says. The potential evidence of life on Mars may give us a better understanding of how life evolved on our own planet.
Of course, the discovery of life on Mars will also provoke epic questions, like: Did life originate on Mars separately from Earth? Was there a common event that created life on both planets? Did life start on one planet and then jump to another via meteorite? Scientists won’t have these answers right away, but with actual samples from Mars, they can start thinking about them. (It’s also possible these Martian samples show no signs of ancient life.)
“Is there life in space?” is one of the biggest questions that gets kids interested in science. But scientists usually have to settle for figuring out the answers to smaller questions. “You learn to ask questions you can actually answer,” Bosak says. Now, in the relatively near future, we might be able to answer the big question.
“This is something that is so unashamedly cool,” Asad Aboobaker, an engineer who worked on an experimental oxygen generator aboard Perseverance, said in a July interview. This is his first Mars mission, and he’s just giddy about it. “Like, I get to send something to Mars, right? I mean, it’s literally going to go to another planet and land there, and it’s going to do something that’s never been done before.”
It’s something hopeful to think about during the coronavirus pandemic. The rover was named Perseverance in March after NASA conducted a nationwide essay-writing contest asking students for their ideas. Back then, the pandemic was not all-encompassing. Now the name has a new significance for many of the NASA engineers who have had to finish their work from home, or in person with increased biohazard safety burdens. “The name has taken on a lot of special meaning,” Glaze says. “The team has really had to overcome unbelievable obstacles.”
Some powerful autonomous tech has landed on the red planet.
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At 3:55 pm ET on February 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover finally landed on Mars, completing a journey through space that began last July. The fifth rover to land on the red planet, this boxy, car-sized vehicle with an extendable arm is now charged with looking for signs of ancient life and gathering data about Mars’s geology and climate. It will even lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of the planet.
To make all that possible, the rover carries a stunning display of technology designed especially for Perseverance’s historic mission, from pieces of a new spacesuit to an autonomous helicopter, the first aircraft ever sent to another planet. Those tools will help the rover gather data about the planet’s atmosphere, which it can then send back to NASA. There’s also an excavation system that can collect high-quality samples of Martian soil to be stashed and later analyzed by a future mission to Mars.
Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021
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NASA