CAPAC: Reuniting Families Crucial to Large-Scale Immigration Reform

By Jennie L. Ilustre

Congresswoman Judy Chu (D, CA), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), has joined forces with other leaders to fight for family reunification in the comprehensive immigration reform bill.

“There is absolutely no reason why we can’t have both family-based and work-based visa programs at the same time,” she said at the CAPAC ceremony celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
“In fact,” she pointed out, “if we’re trying to attract the world’s best and brightest, many of them want to be able to bring their families, too!”
“Keeping families together has been a cornerstone of our immigration policy for decades,” she noted. “But now, that simple idea is under assault.”
Family-based visas are at risk in the proposed legislation, filed in the Senate by a bipartisan group called the Gang of 8 on April 17. For example, the bill would end the sibling (brothers, sisters) category. Its focus would shift from family reunification to a skills visa system.
“Family reunification is very, very important to this Caucus, to the country,” former House Speaker and now House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, California) stressed in her remarks.

Congressman Xavier Becerra (D, CA) declared, “I am here to pledge to you as the Chairman of the Democratic Caucus and negotiator” on the bill that he would fight for family reunification. He declared that “there’s no true immigration reform” if reuniting families is not a key part of the bill.

In fighting for today’s top issues like comprehensive immigration reform, Congresswoman Chu has made CAPAC stronger by further enhancing its coalition with the Hispanic American Caucus and the African American Caucus in the House of Representatives.
CAPAC is a bicameral caucus of 41 members of the US Congress. It includes 13 Asian Americans and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who spoke on the reform bill via a video message. The ceremony took place on May 8 at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, located in the nation’s capital.

Prompt Response
Remarked CAPAC Chair Chu: “When we heard that these issues were being discussed in the Senate, CAPAC immediately took action. We sent a letter signed by 24 lawmakers to each member of the Gang of 8 urging them to preserve family-based immigration and recognize the importance of these programs to the Asian community.”
She added: “Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the first Asian American woman in the U.S. Senate and a longtime member of CAPAC, sent her own letter with six other Senators urging the Senate negotiators to make it easier for families to be reunited through immigration reform.”

“We followed up on these letters by calling every member of the Gang of Eight and spoke with several senators directly about our concerns,” she said. “We even met with Majority Leader Harry Reid to ask for his support in protecting family immigration as the bill moved through the Senate.”
Family-oriented Hispanic Americans helped President Barack Obama win a second term in last year’s election, giving him 72 per cent of their vote, including in battleground states. Obama had promised an immigration reform bill once in office, but failed. He has made it a top priority in his second term.
In last November’s presidential election, the Latino Americans demonstrated that candidates who want to win in national elections need their vote.
Despite obstacles and bill-killing amendments, the consensus is that the proposed legislation–S. 744, The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act–will pass in the 113th U.S. Congress. Lawmakers expect to approve an immigration reform bill this month.
Senators and congressmen from both parties are determined to pass the bill–before the summer recess and before the campaign season for the 2014 mid-term elections.
Both the ruling Democratic Party and the opposition Republican Party leaders are also concerned over winning the Latino American vote in the 2016 presidential election.

DREAM
Echoing the day’s theme, Asian Jose Antonio Vargas, 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and subject of a 2012 Time magazine cover story stressed: “Uniting families must be a cornerstone in our immigration reform.”

Vargas was brought from the Philippines to this country as a minor without official document. He was the last and featured speaker at the event, attended by about 200 advocates, some coming from across the nation. He spoke after Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and Congresswoman Pelosi.
The sweeping immigration reform bill includes a provision that seeks to give Vargas–and other alien minors like him who entered the country without an official visa–an expedited five-year path to citizenship after paying a fine and fulfilling other requirements.
The provision was a bill that had failed to pass in Congress in recent years: The Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.
Vargas’ message to his audience was the same one he has been giving to African Americans and whites in 45 out of 50 states recently. He said it is the same message he would deliver, in the next two months, to the ultra-conservative Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, which focuses on tighter border security: “We need your help. Immigration rights are civil rights…My equality is tied to your equality.”

Vargas, 31, was 12 when he arrived in the US. He didn’t know until he applied for a driver’s license at age 16 that he had a fake visa. In 2011, “tired of running,” he came out of the shadows, using the prestigious New York Times as his forum. He also publicly came out of the closet.
With his lawyer J.T. Mallonga of the New York-based Filipino American Legal Defense Fund in the audience, Vargas began his speech by saying, “I’m one of the 11 million undocumented in the country, and one of 1.2 million undocumented Asian Pacific Americans.”
While a thousand illegal aliens are deported every day, he said simply, without bragging, “I am the most privileged.”
Saying “with great privilege comes great obligation,” he founded Define American, and has traveled in 45 out of 50 states, engaging the country in “a conversation” on the issue. He will premier a documentary, “Documented,” at the Newseum here on June 20.
The only one in his clan of 30 in the U.S. who is undocumented, he said he knows citizens who have spouses who are undocumented, as well as classmates and co-workers.
Vargas went to college on a scholarship. He worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. Contrary to belief that the undocumented “only take and take and take,” he noted they paid “$11.2 billion in taxes” in 2010 alone. “I’m an American,” Vargas declared, wrapping up his 25-minute speech, and receiving a standing ovation.

 

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