Joe Biden’s immigration plan unveiled, offering 11 million a path to US citizenship
- Democrats say the ‘long overdue’ legislation is mostly aimed at people who have lived in the country for many years, including ‘Dreamers’
- The bill includes a proposal to stop calling undocumented immigrants ‘aliens’, instead referring to them as ‘non-citizens’
Democrats unveiled legislation on Thursday for President Joe Biden’s plan to create a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, saying there is no justification for denying them a permanent home in the United States.
Top Democrats said the legislation, blocked for more than a decade by Republicans, is “long overdue”, noting that most of those it will address have lived in the country for many years, with homes, businesses and US-born children and grandchildren.
It will offer an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million.
Some, including people brought to the country as children – so-called Dreamers – and farmworkers, will get an immediate path to permanent residence or a “green card”, allowing them to work legally.
Others addressed include tens of thousands of people who remained in the United States for years under temporary protected status (TPS) due to violent upheavals or natural disasters in their home countries.