Democrats take up new bill to back Biden administration on expanding immigration

The US Citizenship Act of 2021 would provide an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship, a process which would last eight years.

The bill proposal follows a number of executive orders concerning immigration issued by President Joe Biden since the beginning of his presidency, including orders to promote naturalization, expand the rights of asylum seekers, expand the resettlement of refugees, and to support the reuniting of families separated at the border.

Biden also issued an executive order protecting "dreamers," illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children with their parents, and another executive order revoking an order signed by former President Donald Trump which demanded stricter enforcement of immigration laws.

Most notably, however, the bill follows an executive order from President Biden halting deportations of most illegal immigrants for 100 days. The executive order was ultimately halted by a Texas judge, allowing necessary deportations to continue for the time being. This means that if the Biden administration wants to stop deportations of illegal immigrants altogether, they would have to get Congress to pass a bill saying so.

The bill has other caveats aside from amnesty provisions. The bill would expand the green card lottery from 55,000 to 80,000 immigrants per year and seeks to increase the number of visas approved by the US government annually.

While the bill seeks to expand prosecution of border traffickers, it offers little further support for border control.

While the bill is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, it would require ten Republicans in the Senate to support it in order to pass the bill, a threshold which observers say the Democrats are unlikely to achieve.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill a "massive proposal for blanket amnesty that would gut enforcement of American laws while creating huge new incentives for people to rush here illegally at the same time." The bill has also been criticized by other Republican lawmakers such as Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

As the Biden administration has expanded immigration, the message has been heard by migrants in the south, who have been heading north to take advantage of this new leniency.