Why women have most at stake in immigration reform

 In contrast, the immigration reform bill now hitting the Senate floor gets a lot right for women — but there are still important fixes to be made to fully include women and families.

First, the path to citizenship, while not perfect, does recognize the particular needs of undocumented women. Sixty percent of undocumented women work in paperless or informal industries. The other 40 percent of undocumented women are at home taking care of their children as primary caregivers. For the first time in a reform proposal, the current bill recognizes that women’s work is valuable but often not documented with pay stubs. The bill allows women to provide alternate forms of proof of employment, such as sworn affidavits from church groups or nonprofit organizations. An amendment that would have removed this provision failed in markup, and senators need to ensure the provision in the base bill survives the floor fight.

Several amendments were defeated that would have increased fees or fines, making the path to citizenship even more challenging financially, particularly for single women or mothers. An amendment allowing fines to be paid in installments passed, which helps in making the path to citizenship more accessible to women, but more can be done.

Second, the current bill is a mixed bag for family immigration. Seventy percent of legal status immigrant women enter the U.S. through the family sponsorship system, a central tenet of U.S. immigration policy. However, at this point, 4.3 million people wait — sometimes for decades — in the family immigration backlog before being reunited with their families.

The bill as it stands would do two critical things: move all spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents into the “immediate relative” category, which would provide quick processing; and clear the entire backlog in a maximum of 10 years.

However, the bill also would eliminate sibling and adult children over 31 sponsorship categories. These eliminations draw arbitrary and heartbreaking lines down the middle of families. Only one amendment seeking to provide hardship waivers for some family members actually went to a vote, but it also failed. This and the disappointing failure of the bill to include same-sex couples are wedges to basic family unity and still need a floor fix.

The bill also proposes a new merit-based system, suggesting a gradual shift from family immigration. It is unclear how women and families will ultimately fare in this system and adjustments should be made to ensure women still have access to the system. An amendment to gather data assessing potential discriminatory effects of this new system passed and hopefully will shed light on these questions in case a further fix is required.

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