Senate Passes Immigration Reform
The U.S. Senate vote yesterday moved us one step closer to some important fixes to our broken immigration policy. On June 27th, the U.S. Senate passed immigration reform legislation (S. 744, the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act,") with a bipartisan vote of 68-32 (including 14 Republicans in the thumbs-up majority). The bill creates a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the United States, including HIV-affected and LGBT immigrants. Immigration reform would reaffirm and strengthen asylum and refugee protections to ensure that the United States is not forcibly deporting vulnerable victims to countries where they face severe discrimination and even torture because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status.
A path to legalization makes it safer for people to come forward for HIV testing, and medical care and treatment. Immigration reform thus is not only essential for protecting basic human rights of millions of individuals, it's good for public health. Bringing people out of the shadows by creating a path to legalization benefits everyone regardless of immigration or HIV status.
The Senate bill is far from perfect. The "border surge" amendment from Republicans Senators Bob Corker (TN) and John Hoeven (R-ND), which likely was the incentive necessary to make the bill more appealing to conservatives, put the bill's already-oversized border protection provisions on steroids. The bill's allocation of a shocking $46.3 billion for border security, including almost 40,000 additional Border Patrol agents, represents a huge waste of taxpayer dollars, turning our border with Mexico into a militarized zone without any protection against human rights violations that currently occur.
The LGBT and HIV community should support comprehensive immigration reform that also fights back against mass incarceration of immigrants in this country. This means supporting creation of a roadmap to U.S. citizenship while pushing back on excessive investment of scarce resources in border policing that treat desperate people seeking better lives like dangerous threats to our national security.