New York Times
By Julia Preston
April 4, 2013
A path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally has become central to the debate on overhauling the immigration system, but recent polls have indicated that many Americans are still making up their minds on the issue, with doubts persisting about what such a path would mean in practice.
The debate could move into high gear next week when a bipartisan group in the Senate is expected to introduce a broad bill, including proposals to allow immigrants here illegally to gain legal status and eventually become citizens. A bipartisan group in the House is also in the final stages of preparing a comprehensive bill.
In six nationwide nonpartisan polls released since January, at least 70 percent of Americans said they supported options allowing those immigrants to remain in the country with some form of legal status. Generally only about one-quarter of those polled said the immigrants should not be allowed to stay.
But results vary widely when Americans are asked whether legal status should include the possibility of citizenship. In a large national poll released on March 21 by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, 63 percent of Americans said immigrants here illegally should be allowed to become citizens if they met certain requirements.
In a poll published a week later by the Pew Research Center, which asked about citizenship in a slightly different way, only 43 percent said they would give citizenship to the immigrants, while 24 percent said the immigrants should be allowed to stay as permanent residents but not citizens. The 20-point gap points to a difficulty facing lawmakers as they sell their proposals to revamp the immigration system: its procedures are unfamiliar and puzzling to many Americans.
The most important overhaul proposals in play would all modify or expand on a core progression in existing law. Currently, certain immigrants who have family ties or employment prospects here can become legal permanent residents with a green card. That is the first step on the path to citizenship, because permanent residents can apply to naturalize after five years, or three years if they are married to citizens.
Lawmakers are wrangling about if and when immigrants who are here illegally should be allowed to apply for green cards, and whether to create a new class of residents who would not be permitted to apply for citizenship.
Some polling questions imply that illegal immigrants would move quickly to citizenship. In fact, the proposals emerging in both houses of Congress would offer naturalization for most illegal immigrants after no less than 13 years, and in some cases far longer. According to staff members, the bipartisan Senate group known as the Gang of Eight is considering a plan to make immigrants wait 10 years in a probationary status before they could apply for green cards, but would then allow them to apply for citizenship after only three years.
House lawmakers are weighing proposals that would also allow immigrants to apply for green cards after 10 years, with naturalization possible five years after that. President Obama has prepared a plan, which he has not publicized, in which the five-year path to citizenship would begin after eight years of provisional status.
All proposals place significant hurdles along the way, including requirements to pay fines and back taxes, pass criminal background checks, and learn English and American civics.
“There is broad recognition that these folks will have to go through a process of atonement,” said Benjamin E. Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council, a group in Washington that works to build support for immigration. “But ultimately at the end of the process they would become full-fledged members of our society through American citizenship.”
None of the citizenship paths under consideration will be complete, however, without measures to reduce huge backlogs in the legal immigration system — an issue that has had little public discussion. One point of agreement between lawmakers from both parties who are working on legislation, as well as Mr. Obama, is that immigrants who have been here illegally have to go to the back of the line behind applicants who followed the rules.
Because of numerical caps on visas for foreigners seeking residency, more than four million people who have been approved for green cards are waiting in those lines for visas, according to official figures. They include about 1.3 million Mexicans, but only 47,250 visas are available for Mexicans each year, according to the State Department. Some Mexican-born children of American citizens must wait 20 years for visas.
A political fight is coming on this issue. Democrats hope to raise or eliminate the caps, at least temporarily, to allow these applicants to move through rapidly, and they want to make new green cards available for immigrants who finish their provisional term.
Two leading Republicans in the negotiations, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Representative Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, reject any separate path to citizenship, insisting that formerly illegal immigrants should be able to apply for green cards only through the existing system, a plan that could add many years before naturalization if current backlogs are not sharply reduced. Republicans, whose voters, recent polls show, are more skeptical about the value of immigration, are reluctant to increase visa numbers. They have proposed freeing up visas by eliminating some relatives of immigrants from eligibility.
Lawmakers on all sides are facing intense pressure from immigrants, especially Latinos, who have been pushing hard for a direct path to citizenship.
“Since the end of slavery we have not created a second class of Americans,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, “and we should not start now.”
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