Senate “referee” deals new blow to Biden’s immigration plan

Elizabeth MacDonough, the person in charge of interpreting the U.S. Senate regulations, dealt a new blow to the immigration plan of President Joe Biden on Wednesday by determining that Democrats cannot use a legislative maneuver to approve it.

It is the second time that MacDonough has taken a stand against one of the Democrats’ main legislative proposals.

MacDonough, who acts as a nonpartisan arbitrator on Senate rules, determined that Democrats cannot include their immigration reform in a $3.5 trillion social plan they want to pass alone through a mechanism called “reconciliation.”

According to a legislative source, MacDonough decided that the Democrats have failed to meet a series of requirements to use that maneuver.

Specifically, Democrats had proposed regularizing millions of undocumented immigrants through a change in the “Registration Act” of 1929, which allowed immigrants who could prove that they had arrived in the United States before accessing permanent residence. 1921.

Over the years, Congress has changed that law four times. The last was in 1986 under Republican President Ronald Reagan, when it was determined that all immigrants who had arrived in the United States before 1972 could access permanent residence and, later, citizenship.

This time, the Democrats proposed changing the date to 2010, which would have allowed 6.7 million illegal immigrants to be regularized, according to the organization FWD.us.

This was the Democrats’ “Plan B” to pass immigration reform. His “Plan A” was to regularize 8 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to live in the United States, but MacDonough also rejected that option this month.

Specifically, “Plan A” proposed the regularization of four groups: “dreamers” who came to the U.S. as children, farmworkers, essential workers (such as medical personnel) and migrants who have accessed to an immigration protection called Temporary Protected Status (TPS, in English).

Democrats want to use the “reconciliation” mechanism to pass immigration changes because they can’t get the 60 votes needed to pass laws in the Senate: they have 50 seats, just like Republicans, although Democrats have the vice president’s runoff vote Kamala Harris, who serves as Speaker of the Upper House.

However, they do not have any support from GOP senators, who for decades have opposed passing immigration reform.

The aforementioned legislative source assured that the Democrats will soon present a new proposal to MacDonough, although before they will hold meetings with groups of legislators and with groups that defend immigrants to determine which is the best option.

Congress has not passed a law for 35 years allowing a large group of immigrants to access citizenship.

The last time was in 1986, when then-President Reagan signed a law that allowed three million undocumented immigrants to be regularized.