Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR)

Can our country create an immigration system that works for everyone?  Congress is now in the midst of writing a first draft of Comprehensive Immigration Reform for the United States.  CIR must fix our outdated immigration system.  Family members, such as siblings of US citizens from the Philippines, spouses of US citizens in the US who entered without a visa; children of Lawful Permanent Residents (green card holders) who are waiting overseas, have all been waiting years, and even decades to be reunited with parents, brothers and sisters, spouses and children. 

Many US employers can’t get US citizens to fill jobs such as landscape-workers, cooks, masons, agricultural workers and are asking Congress to expand our employment-based visas. 

Immigration Reform needs both family-based visas and employment-based visas which make sense.  A family member should not have to wait years to be reunited, and an employer should not have to wait years to hire an employee.  That just does not make sense. 

The high level of deportations of the 1990s has separated families from their loved ones and separated employers from devoted and dependable employees who held positions that US citizens didn’t want.  When a person who has been tortured, jailed, or persecuted in his/her own country, escapes to the US seeking safety from oppressors, that person can end up having his/her case denied simply because he missed an arbitrarily imposed one year filing deadline.  Is that how our political asylum process was envisioned when it was enacted?  A severely
oppressed person, fleeing to the US, not fluent in English, is simply not able
to answer detailed questions at a port of entry. 

While family members and employees stand in long lines for years waiting for immigration visas, some spouses and fiancés of US citizens cannot even get on a line.

This week, our US Supreme Court heard detailed arguments in 2 cases:  Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor.  If the US Supreme Court strikes down DOMA (Defense Against Marriage Act), this could clear the way for thousands of US citizens to apply for their fiancées and spouses through our immigration system.  There are estimates of 267,000 LGBT immigrants among the undocumented population in the US.   Many of the brave leaders of the DREAM ACT have come out twice; as undocumented persons and as members of the LGBT
community. 

For CIR to be a lasting solution, it must seek to bring together families who have been living in exile for years, those living in the shadows in the US, and be a system that works for everyone, including our LGBT community.  We are at a critical crossroad in US history.  Enter the debate, and make your voice heard.