Friends Committee on National Legislation
Response to Representative Luis Gutierrez's Core Principles for a
New Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill
The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) applauds Representative Luis Gutierrez's leadership in outlining core principles for a progressive comprehensive immigration reform bill. At FCNL, we see these principles as taking important strides to ensure that this country's immigration system respects the basic rights and dignity of all immigrants.
Speaking for people of faith guided by the spiritual values of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), FCNL's work on immigration is led by the call for right relationships among all people. We believe that respect for human and civil rights is essential to safeguarding the integrity of our society and the inherent dignity of all human beings. We recognize that governments have an indispensable role in upholding these rights and that citizens have the responsibility to make governments more responsive, open, and accountable.
At FCNL, we seek a society with equity and justice for all. We have seen the degradation of the U.S. immigration system over the last twenty years. Overly punitive laws in tandem with increased enforcement and an inefficient bureaucracy have led to systematic violations of rights: indiscriminate raids, detention without due process, worker exploitation, and families separated for years or even decades. It is our hope that the humane immigration reform measures proposed by Representative Gutierrez would restore integrity to the U.S. tradition of welcoming immigrants and provide real solutions to a broken immigration system.
We are encouraged to see that Representative Gutierrez's principles prioritize family unity as a cornerstone of the U.S immigration system.
As people of faith, we believe that family is the bedrock of U.S. society and is critical in the development of healthy individuals and strong communities. Separating families for long periods of time can create severe emotional and financial hardship. We share Representative Gutierrez's concern that in the current system U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents must wait between five and twenty-two years to be reunited with their close loved ones.
We urge Representative Gutierrez to include the Reuniting Families Act (H.R. 2709) in comprehensive immigration reform. The inclusion of the Reuniting Families Act would implement critically needed reforms to the U.S. family immigration system and restore family unity as a fundamental principle of U.S. immigration policy. Specifically, the inclusion of this bill would allow for revision of the family preference categories; augmentation of the per-country caps on family visas; discretion on humanitarian grounds for family reunification; and expedited processing of visa applications caught up in lengthy visa backlogs. As a critical component of immigration reform, we urge Representative Gutierrez not to include any type of 'point system' or other mechanism that puts employment-based visas in competition with family-based visas. Representative Gutierrez has also called for immigration reform that treats all immigrant families fairly and equally. We urge Representative Gutierrez to carry out that principle to its fullest measure by including families headed by same-gender partners.
We agree with Representative Gutierrez that the reformed immigration system must include an equitable path to legal status and eventual citizenship.
Pathways to legal status and eventual citizenship would reduce undocumented immigrants' vulnerability to exploitation by permitting them to integrate fully into local communities and enjoy the same social, political, and labor rights as their neighbors. Provisions on legalization should create a reasonable and inclusive path for undocumented immigrants, multi-status families, refugees, and asylees to regularize their status and earn eventual citizenship. This program should be workable and not hindered by overly punitive criteria.
We commend Representative Gutierrez for his stated commitment to protecting the rights of all workers.
At FCNL, we believe that immigration policies must ensure that all people can work with dignity. Laws governing wages, hours, health, and safety should be strictly enforced; the ability to organize protected; and remedies to redress workplace grievances made available to all workers including low-income and immigrant workers, regardless of immigration status. Abiding by strict labor and employment laws would remove the economic incentive for employers to import undocumented workers, thereby undercutting wages, job security, and working conditions for those already in the United States.
Representative Gutierrez is right to recognize that the current employment-based immigration laws often do not reflect the needs of the U.S. economy. In order to ensure that future flows of migration are aligned with market demand, we call for an expansion of legal avenues for workers, including low-skilled workers, to migrate to the United States in a safe and legal manner. Such avenues must be designed to meet the legitimate needs of the economy without undercutting workers already in the United States.
We also encourage Representative Gutierrez to include provisions in his upcoming bill that accord all immigrant workers, including those in temporary or guest worker programs, their widely recognized human rights, including keeping families together, changing one's place of employment, and applying for lawful permanent status and eventual citizenship.
Representative Gutierrez's call for fair immigration proceedings and humane treatment of immigration detainees comes at an important time.
In recent years, the use of detention as a tool of enforcement has skyrocketed; more than 440,000 people will be detained in the immigration detention system by the end of 2009. All persons, regardless of immigration status, should be afforded due process protections including the right to counsel and an independent judicial review of individual circumstances in a timely manner. Since most immigration violations are civil rather than criminal in nature, legislation on humane immigration detention reform should create a presumption against the detention of immigrants and asylum seekers. The government should expedite the release of individuals who pose no flight or security risk and expand the use of community-based alternatives to detention, which are more humane and cost effective. For those who are incarcerated, binding detention standards should be developed to ensure access to basic rights, such as adequate access to health care, protection from unnecessary restraints and arbitrary transfer, access to telephones, and contact with families.
FCNL is deeply worried about the effects of the current immigration enforcement program on human rights and dignity. We sincerely hope that Representative Gutierrez's provisions on immigration enforcement, both at U.S. borders and in the interior, will realign enforcement with humanitarian values. The 287(g) program, which deputizes local police officers to enforce immigration laws, has led to widespread racial and religious profiling and should be terminated. Indiscriminate raids should be ended and all other enforcement programs, such as ICE ACCESS and Secure Communities, should be subject to stricter oversight. As Congress advances through the process of considering Representative Gutierrez's upcoming bill, we urge consideration of these concerns regarding enforcement.
We commend Representative Gutierrez for promoting immigrant integration and recognizing the need for additional federal resources to support integration programs at state and local levels.
At FCNL, we believe that immigration policies should support communities with high concentrations of immigrants by facilitating immigrant integration. We encourage Representative Gutierrez to direct federal funding to state and local governments and organizations providing multi-lingual and civics education, outreach, and naturalization assistance. Federal funding for these programs would provide individuals with needed support and create strong and resilient communities.
We support Representative Gutierrez's efforts to reform the U.S. immigration system. We look forward to the introduction of his progressive bill on comprehensive immigration reform.
For questions or comments, please contact: Rebecca Sheff, Legislative Program Assistant on Immigration, Human Rights, and Civil Liberties, (202) 903-2523, rebecca@fcnl.org.
To read Representative Gutierrez's principles, click here.