Editor’s note: This post originally appeared as a blog post on Boundless, a Pioneer Square Labs spinout that uses technology to make it easier for people to navigate the complicated U.S. immigration process.
Related: Tech industry slams GOP plan to dramatically cut legal immigration
President Trump just endorsed a bill called the “RAISE Act,” which was drafted by two Senators with the stated intent of “reducing overall immigration by half.”
There are plenty of reasons to feel uncertainty about immigration policy these days. This bill isn’t one of them.
Let’s consider the facts:
Only Congress has the power to change our current system of legal immigration, which allocates about 650,000 green cards per year to bring families together. A U.S. citizen can sponsor a spouse, child, parent, or sibling for a green card. A U.S. green card holder can sponsor a spouse or unmarried child. This isn’t likely to change any time soon, because…
The RAISE Act doesn’t have the votes to pass Congress. For arcane parliamentary reasons, the recent bill to repeal Obamacare only required 50 votes in the Senate, and still couldn’t clear that hurdle. Passing a bill to reshape legal immigration requires a majority in the House (218 votes) and a supermajority in the Senate (60 votes). That level of support is unimaginable for a bill like this.
But you don’t have to take my word for it.
- Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat from New York): This bill is a “non-starter.” (That’s 48 votes on the Democratic side — more than enough to block a bill that can’t lose more than 40 votes.)
- Senator Lindsay Graham (Republican from South Carolina): “If this proposal were to become law, it would be devastating to our state’s economy.”(And Graham isn’t the only Republican who will oppose it).
- The Cato Institute (libertarian think tank): “Bill to Cut Legal Immigration Won’t Work and Isn’t an Effective Bargaining Chip”
Simply put, the RAISE Act is a “message bill” — that’s a term you hear a lot in Washington, D.C. to describe a bill intended to make a political statement, not to become the law of the land.
Everyone does it, left and right. Here’s an Obama-championed bill to raise taxes on cigarettes to fund universal pre-K. Here’s a Republican bill to privatize 3.3 million acres of public lands. Like them or not, these bills are about taking a stand, not changing the law. They didn’t even come up for a vote, because they simply didn’t have the support to pass both houses of Congress — and neither does a bill to cut legal immigration in half.
That’s why, despite all the attention it’s getting, the RAISE Act evokes another term you hear a lot in the nation’s capital: “dead on arrival.”
