Casa de Maryland
Raymond Jose watched from the U.S. Senate gallery on Thursday as senators passed the most comprehensive immigration reform bills in years and thought, “We created this moment.”
When Jose was a senior in high school, his parents sat him down and told him they had overstayed their visa, leaving the family and Jose, who had come to the U.S. from the Philippines at the age of 9, undocumented.
Jose, now a student at Montgomery College, said he quickly realized he had fallen through the cracks of what he called the country’s “broken immigration system,” leaving him unable to accept the three scholarship offers he had just received while at a track meet — the news he had been so excited to share with his parents and that had ultimately prompted them to tell Jose about their undocumented status.
Passing a normally partisan Senate by a vote of 68 to 32, Thursday’s bill would provide a 13-year path to citizenship for the country’s 11 million estimated undocumented immigrants while significantly increasing security along the border.
“The bill is potentially the first piece of comprehensive immigration reform in about 30 years, since the … Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,” said Robert Koulish, a government and politics professor at this university whose research centers on immigration.
“Typically when Congress has been reforming immigration law over the last three decades, it’s done so in a very piecemeal fashion,” Koulish said. “So this is really the first time that it’s attacking a lot of different categories of immigration law and policy and changing it at one time.”
But the biggest challenges still lie ahead for immigration reform as the debate heads to a Republican-controlled House, led by Speaker John Boehner, who has said the chamber won’t consider the bill unless a majority of the GOP representatives support it and that it may instead work toward legislation that does not provide a pathway to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally.
“I’m really worried for the House,” said Mariela Cruz, the Latino Student Union advocacy vice president and senior criminology and criminal justice major. “I know it’s not going to be easy.”
Koulish said the bill’s Corker-Hoeven amendment, which would double the number of border control officers and increase the fence along the southern border by 350 miles, was added in hopes of increasing its chances of passing the House. But he said it remains uncertain whether the reform will be enacted this year.
“The battle in the House is where immigration reform may die,” Koulish said.
Both Cruz and Jose, now an organizer for United We Dream, the largest youth immigration group in the U.S., realize a lot of work remains to be done to push the immigration reform movement along. For Cruz, that means reaching out to representatives and making her stance known through phone calls and outlets such as Twitter.
Jose said he will continue to urge politicians to work toward a comprehensive immigration reform bill free of additional roadblocks to citizenship and hold members of Congress accountable for their actions and promises.
Jose said an important part of the movement is making clear to politicians what the consequences will be if an acceptable immigration reform bill fails to pass, touching upon a central point of anxiety among Republicans heading into midterm elections and eventually 2016.
“We’re already looking forward to next year, to make sure that if things don’t go the way that we planned … that our community, the immigrant community, is nothing to be messed with,” Jose said. “We know who we need to keep pressuring and make sure that they realize that if they don’t touch on immigration reform, if they don’t give us what we need and what we want, we can organize our communities and make sure that the GOP never sees the White House.”
