Washington, D.C. (September 15, 2021) - Major policy changes deserve rigorous debate by our representatives in Congress and the public. Yet an amnesty for an estimated eight million people has been slipped into a reconciliation bill in order to avoid hearings and quickly advance the bill with only a simple majority in the Senate.
Here are some of the likely reasons the bill sponsors avoided the normal legislative process:
The Reconciliation Bill’s Amnesty Carries a Price Tag of $1Trillion
The amnesty for 8 million illegal immigrants contained within the budget reconciliation bill would generate a total cost to Social Security and Medicare Part A of roughly $1 trillion in present value. Under current law, illegal immigrants are net contributors to Social Security and Medicare because they partially pay in to entitlement programs, but most cannot legally receive benefits. By granting eligibility for benefits, however, amnesty would transform illegal immigrants from net contributors into net beneficiaries, imposing steep costs on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “Because most of the entitlement costs associated with amnesty would occur outside the typical 10-year budget window of the Congressional Budget Office, it is imperative that Congress ask the CBO to do a special analysis of long-term entitlement costs when it scores the amnesty provisions of this reconciliation bill. Otherwise, the most significant costs of the amnesty will be hidden.”
Reconciliation Bill Extends Amnesty and Eventual Citizenship to Criminals
The bill grants green cards to a large number of illegal aliens, even those who are removable on criminal grounds, even if they are inadmissible. Criminal exceptions to the amnesty are included in the bill, but then waivers negate their significance. The DHS secretary is given the ability to waive applicants’ criminal, smuggling, student-visa abuse, and unlawful voting grounds of in admissibility “for humanitarian purposes or family unity” or “if a waiver is otherwise in the public interest.” The secretary can also waive any of the criminal grounds of inadmissibility. The bill also prevents the secretary from “automatically treat[ing] an expunged conviction as a conviction”. Convictions will no longer be a bar to a green card as the bill allows convictions for offenses – regardless of how heinous or violent – to be wiped off the applicant’s record.
Andrew Arthur, the Center’s resident fellow in law and policy, said, “If House leadership wants to grant amnesty to alien criminals, they should at least have the decency to let the American people, let alone their fellow partisans and colleagues in the GOP, know what they are up to. And if they did not intend to offer a massive, unending amnesty to criminal aliens, they should have taken their time in drafting their proposal — and not be attempting to jam through haphazard language drafted hours before it was presented to committee members.”
Legal Immigration Will Explode
The reconciliation bill also substantially increases permanent, legal immigration. The bill disregards current immigration law and the congressionally set ceilings by “recapturing unused immigration visas” between fiscal years 1992 and 2021. The unused visas come back to life and nullify the per-country cap restrictions Congress implemented to encourage diversity and assimilation. Treating these visas as entitlements provides an estimated 703,455 green cards, and this does not even include the fiscal year 2020 and 2021 numbers. The bill also revives the green cards of aliens who won the visa lottery in fiscal years 2017-21 but failed to receive the visa and be admitted. These lottery winners have an indefinite window to (re)-obtain their visa. But that is not all – the bill also offers an exemption from the green card annual numerical limits and the per country cap if a supplemental fee is paid. The provision allows applications to be filed all the way up to the last day of fiscal year 2031, a deadline likely to be extended indefinitely as it is rare for any temporary program to actually be permitted to expire.
Robert Law, the Center’s director of regulatory affairs and policy, said, “If these provisions become law, an already overwhelmed USCIS will be flooded with amnesty applications and special legal immigration carve-out petitions on top of standard immigration benefit requests. The backlogs will skyrocket, ensuring that it will take decades before the final adjustment of status application is adjudicated and all of the aliens who file will be eligible for a work permit. Unlike an employment-based green card, which generally requires a showing that the wages and conditions of Americans are not adversely affected, this work permit allows the alien to take any job, at any wage, and there are no protections for either Americans or the alien.”
