Pablo Manríquez who covers immigration beat (among other things) in DC is well acquainted with Indian immigrants and their advocacy efforts in USA. Over years various immigrant groups have tried to join hands and work together very closely instead of staying divided and letting Lawyers and shady groups like FWD.us influence policy.
Pablo was one of the first journalist in USA to have realized the deep hatred Indian immigrant community had for Senator Dick Durbin of IL. Senator Dick Durbin and then Senator Obama threw a wrench in a major immigration reform that President Bush had worked on himself. A lot of the problems including DACA would have been less of problems if Durbin and Obama had shown sense. However both of them wanted to advance their own careers by holding immigrant groups hostage.
EAGLE Act that Indian immigrants have been working for many years now is one of the most popular immigration bill on the hill and routinely passes Senate or House every year in some form but never it has passed both.
It is a bipartisan and bicameral bill which has received co-sponsors like Tom Cotton and Kamala Harris (when she was a Senator).
“To help the people from India at the expense of everyone else is their solution,” Durbin said. “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.”
Republican orthodoxy is to oppose any new green cards until the U.S. border with Mexico is “secure”—a political term with moving goal posts and endless appropriations from the public purse to the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies.
The decades-long wait times for green cards Durbin refers to are particularly long for immigrants due to per-country caps that limit how many green cards can go to family-and work-based visa holders from a given country. The Eagle Act eliminates the employment-based cap altogether while increasing the family-based cap from 7 to 15 percent.’
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Senator Dick Durbin is the person standing between this draft becoming a bill. As one can easily see, he is coming up with poison pill proposals such as “more green cards” which will never pass any house or even get votes from his own party, let alone republicans.
The bill already addresses all other concerns raised by him, but in reality Dick Durbin has refused to even negotiate or even work on solving the problems he thinks are the problems.
Interestingly, passing the Eagle Act will give much stronger footing to the demand of more green cards as entire world will then be facing the problem but right now rest of the world benefits at the behest of the plight of Indian immigrants.
Lack of green card is the primary reason for how the backlog and spilled into systems that are now choking up various American institutions. Enrollment of foreign students has dropped into US universities, American Consulates are in bad shape, USCIS is crumbling and being abused by immigrants for their incompetence, DHS Is completely helpless and even state institutions like DMV are seeing a higher load of folks trying to renew their driving licenses etc. American courts are filled with thousands of cases involving all sort of immigration cases caused by dysfunctional American immigration law.
The collapse of American immigration system is imminent if this problem is not solved but Senator Dick Durbin remains one of the biggest hurdles in the process and immigrants have correctly called him out as a disgusting racist.
The key to fixing American immigration is to basically get any proposal out of the door first using any route possible. That is something Obama did with DACA and it became a permanent feature of US immigration system. Even Donald Trump could not touch it. The TPS (Temporary Protected Status) as we all know is now a permanent status. Many of these relief majors were done as immediate relief but ended up becoming long term features.
This is not a bad thing as it provides relief to some group of people immediately. Obama also created H4EAD which despite the ridiculously cheap efforts of Trump administration has become a permanent feature.
There are number of things Durbin can get done if he is willing to do so but right now all evidence indicates that he is a dishonest hustler who wont achieve zilch.
