Whereas the current system creates an unintentional “chain migration,” backlogs, frustration, illegal immigration, and a level of immigration incompatible with conservation and economic justice, our vision would:
Prioritize the admission of spouses and minor children – including adoptees – of citizens and legal permanent residents.
Create a renewable non-work temporary visa for elderly parents to stay with their children and grandchildren for long periods of time.
Support a robust and welcoming visitor system for extended family
ReEnvisioning: Value of U.S. Citizenship
Whereas the current system raffles away green cards and puts tourists who give birth in the U.S. on a path to citizenship, our vision would:
End the annual ritual of putting 50,000 green cards into a lottery.
Clarify automatic birthright citizenship to include children born to parents who are either a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, or performing active service in the U.S. Armed Forces.
ReEnvisioning: Temporary Guest Worker Programs
Whereas the current system displaces qualified Americans with exploitable foreign workers, our vision would:
Encourage domestic recruitment channels into underserved communities.
End programs that offer financial incentives to hire foreign labor over domestic.
Strictly limit the length of temporary worker programs to better align with true emergency situations.
Compensate temporary foreign workers at levels commensurate with filling critical gaps in the labor market.
ReEnvisioning: Employment-Based Immigration
Whereas the current system too often brings in workers with skills similar to Americans and/or drains the sending countries of the “change agents” necessary to improve the lives of those left behind, our vision would:
Prioritize immigrants with exceptional skills that either could not be fully realized in the sending country or that serve an extraordinary national interest.
Eliminate visas for workers with non-extraordinary skills.
Encourage domestic recruitment channels into underserved communities.
ReEnvisioning: Humanitarian Immigration
Whereas the current system – riddled with fraud – primarily serves non-urgent refugees, economic migrants, and government-funded resettlement agencies; whereas the current system is riddled with fraud; and whereas just one percent of the 20 million refugees worldwide are resettled, our vision would:
Prioritize for permanent resettlement internationally recognized special needs refugees with no long-term prospects of returning home or settling in their native regions.
Redirect funding to areas in and near the home countries where it can save far more people.