A new coalition of stakeholders in immigration policy has begun to pull together bipartisan legislation to secure the border, fix the broken asylum system and modernize immigration law, Rep. Tom Suozzi said Tuesday, as reported by Newsday, also published on Mr. Suozzi’s website.
Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) said he and Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) kicked off the new effort last week with a roundtable meeting attended by 50 immigration advocates, business associations and others engaged in the issue in person in Washington and another 70 on Zoom.
The goal, Suozzi told Newsday, is to build a broad-based national bipartisan coalition and to cobble together existing bipartisan immigration legislation that lawmakers already have negotiated into a package that sponsors could introduce as early as September.
“The U.S. faces an immigration crisis because too many politicians have spent too many years ‘weaponizing’ immigration policy, fighting across the aisle — but haven’t done a thing to fix it,” Suozzi said.
The White House and Democratic leaders have pointed to Suozzi’s campaign as a model for Democrats to address what remains one of the most politically fraught issues for them.
In May, Suozzi and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) called on President Joe Biden to issue executive actions to bring order to the border and to give legal work permits to the 1.1 million immigrant spouses married to U.S. citizens.
In June, Biden issued executive actions to bar migrants who cross the border unlawfully from receiving asylum when encounters are high and to create a new process that allows noncitizen spouses and children to apply for lawful permanent residence in the United States.
Sources: Newsday; Tom Suozzi
Photo source: terryballard, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
