From the White House
FACT SHEET: Fixing our Broken Immigration System so Everyone Plays by the Rules
January 30, 2013--America’s immigration system is broken. Too many employers game the
system by hiring undocumented workers and there are 11 million people living in the shadows.
Neither is good for the economy or the country.
It is time to act to fix the broken immigration system in a way that requires responsibility from
everyone —both from the workers here illegally and those who hire them—and guarantees that
everyone is playing by the same rules.
President Obama’s commonsense immigration reform proposal has four parts. First, continue
to strengthen our borders. Second, crack down on companies that hire undocumented workers.
Third, hold undocumented immigrants accountable before they can earn their citizenship; this
means requiring undocumented workers to pay their taxes and a penalty, move to the back of
the line, learn English, and pass background checks. Fourth, streamline the legal immigration
system for families, workers, and employers.
Together we can build a fair, effective and commonsense immigration system that lives up to
our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.
The key principles the President believes should be included in commonsense immigration
reform are:
· Continuing to Strengthen Border Security: President Obama has doubled the number of
Border Patrol agents since 2004 and today border security is stronger than it has ever been.
But there is more work to do. The President’s proposal gives law enforcement the tools they
need to make our communities safer from crime. And by enhancing our infrastructure and
technology, the President’s proposal continues to strengthen our ability to remove criminals and
apprehend and prosecute national security threats.
· Cracking Down on Employers Hiring Undocumented Workers: Our businesses should
only employ people legally authorized to work in the United States. Businesses that knowingly
employ undocumented workers are exploiting the system to gain an advantage over
businesses that play by the rules. The President’s proposal is designed to stop these unfair
hiring practices and hold these companies accountable. At the same time, this proposal gives
employers who want to play by the rules a reliable way to verify that their employees are here
legally.
· Earned Citizenship: It is just not practical to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants
living within our borders. The President’s proposal provides undocumented immigrants a legal
way to earn citizenship that will encourage them to come out of the shadows so they can pay
their taxes and play by the same rules as everyone else. Immigrants living here illegally must
be held responsible for their actions by passing national security and criminal background
checks, paying taxes and a penalty, going to the back of the line, and learning English before
they can earn their citizenship. There will be no uncertainty about their ability to become U.S.
citizens if they meet these eligibility criteria. The proposal will also stop punishing innocent
young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents and give them
a chance to earn their citizenship more quickly if they serve in the military or pursue higher
education.
· Streamlining Legal Immigration: Our immigration system should reward anyone who is
willing to work hard and play by the rules. For the sake of our economy and our security, legal
immigration should be simple and efficient. The President’s proposal attracts the best minds
to America by providing visas to foreign entrepreneurs looking to start businesses here and
helping the most promising foreign graduate students in science and math stay in this country
after graduation, rather than take their skills to other countries. The President’s proposal will
also reunify families in a timely and humane manner.
Continuing to Strengthen Border Security
· Strengthen border security and infrastructure. The President’s proposal strengthens and
improves infrastructure at ports of entry, facilitates public-private partnerships aimed at
increasing investment in foreign visitor processing, and continues supporting the use of
technologies that help to secure the land and maritime borders of the United States.
· Combat transnational crime. The President’s proposal creates new criminal penalties
dedicated to combating transnational criminal organizations that traffic in drugs, weapons, and
money, and that smuggle people across the borders. It also expands the scope of current law
to allow for the forfeiture of these organizations’ criminal tools and proceeds. Through this
approach, we will bolster our efforts to deprive criminal enterprises, including those operating
along the Southwest border, of their infrastructure and profits.
· Improve partnerships with border communities and law enforcement. The President’s
proposal expands our ability to work with our cross-border law enforcement partners.
Community trust and cooperation are keys to effective law enforcement. To this end, the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will establish border community liaisons along the
Southern and Northern borders to improve communication and collaboration with border
communities, boost funding to tribal government partners to reduce illegal activity on tribal
lands, and strengthen training on civil rights and civil liberties for DHS immigration officers.
· Crack down on criminal networks engaging in passport and visa fraud and human
smuggling. The President’s proposal creates tough criminal penalties for trafficking in
passports and immigration documents and schemes to defraud, including those who prey on
vulnerable immigrants through notario fraud. It also strengthens penalties to combat human
smuggling rings.
· Deporting Criminals. The President’s proposal expands smart enforcement efforts that
target convicted criminals in federal or state correctional facilities, allowing us to remove them
from the United States at the end of their sentences without re-entering our communities. At the
same time, it protects those with a credible fear of returning to their home countries.
· Streamline removal of nonimmigrant national security and public safety threats. The
President’s proposal creates a streamlined administrative removal process for people who
overstay their visas and have been determined to be threats to national security and public
safety.
· Improve our nation’s immigration courts. The President’s proposal invests in our
immigration courts. By increasing the number of immigration judges and their staff, investing in
training for court personnel, and improving access to legal information for immigrants, these
reforms will improve court efficiency. It allows DHS to better focus its detention resources on
public safety and national security threats by expanding alternatives to detention and reducing
overall detention costs. It also provides greater protections for those least able to represent
themselves.
Cracking Down on Employers Who Hire Undocumented Workers
· Mandatory, phased-in electronic employment verification. The President’s proposal
provides tools for employers to ensure a legal workforce by using federal government
databases to verify that the people they hire are eligible to work in the United States. Penalties
for hiring undocumented workers are significantly increased, and new penalties are
established for committing fraud and identity theft. The new mandatory program ensures the
privacy and confidentiality of all workers’ personal information and includes important
procedural protections. Mandatory electronic employment verification would be phased in over
five years with exemptions for certain small businesses.
· Combat fraud and identity theft. The proposal also mandates a fraud‐resistant, tamper‐
resistant Social Security card and requires workers to use fraud‐and tamper‐resistant
documents to prove authorization to work in the United States. The proposal also seeks to
establish a voluntary pilot program to evaluate new methods to authenticate identity and combat
identity theft.
· Protections for all workers. The President’s proposal protects workers against retaliation
for exercising their labor rights. It increases the penalties for employers who hire
undocumented workers to skirt the workplace standards that protect all workers. And it creates
a “labor law enforcement fund” to help ensure that industries that employ significant numbers of
immigrant workers comply with labor laws.
Pathway to Earned Citizenship
· Create a provisional legal status. Undocumented immigrants must come forward and
register, submit biometric data, pass criminal background and national security checks, and
pay fees and penalties before they will be eligible for a provisional legal status. Agricultural
workers and those who entered the United States as children would be eligible for the same
program. Individuals must wait until the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared before
getting in line to apply for lawful permanent residency (i.e. a “green card”), and ultimately United
States citizenship. Consistent with current law, people with provisional legal status will not be
eligible for welfare or other federal benefits, including subsidies or tax credits under the new
health care law.
· Create strict requirements to qualify for lawful permanent resident status. Those applying
for green cards must pay their taxes, pass additional criminal background and national security
checks, register for Selective Service (where applicable), pay additional fees and penalties, and
learn English and U.S. civics. As under current law, five years after receiving a green card,
individuals will be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship like every other legal permanent resident.
· Earned citizenship for DREAMers. Children brought here illegally through no fault of their
own by their parents will be eligible for earned citizenship. By going to college or serving
honorably in the Armed Forces for at least two years, these children should be given an
expedited opportunity to earn their citizenship. The President’s proposal brings these
undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.
· Create administrative and judicial review. An individual whose provisional lawful status
has been revoked or denied, or whose application for adjustment has been denied, will have
the opportunity to seek administrative and judicial review of those decisions.
· Provide new resources to combat fraud. The President’s proposal authorizes funding to
enable DHS, the Department of State, and other relevant federal agencies to establish fraud
prevention programs that will provide training for adjudicators, allow regular audits of
applications to identify patterns of fraud and abuse, and incorporate other proven fraud
prevention measures.
Streamlining Legal Immigration
· Keep Families Together. The proposal seeks to eliminate existing backlogs in the family-
sponsored immigration system by recapturing unused visas and temporarily increasing annual
visa numbers. The proposal also raises existing annual country caps from 7 percent to 15
percent for the family-sponsored immigration system. It also treats same-sex families as
families by giving U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the ability to seek a visa on the
basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner. The proposal also revises current
unlawful presence bars and provides broader discretion to waive bars in cases of hardship.
· Cut Red Tape for Employers. The proposal also eliminates the backlog for employment-
sponsored immigration by eliminating annual country caps and adding additional visas to the
system. Outdated legal immigration programs are reformed to meet current and future
demands by exempting certain categories from annual visa limitations.
· Enhance travel and tourism. The Administration is committed to increasing U.S. travel and
tourism by facilitating legitimate travel while maintaining our nation’s security. Consistent with
the President’s Executive Order on travel and tourism, the President’s proposal securely
streamlines visa and foreign visitor processing. It also strengthens law enforcement
cooperation while maintaining the program’s robust counterterrorism and criminal information
sharing initiatives. It facilitates more efficient travel by allowing greater flexibility to designate
countries for participation in the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of designated
countries to visit the United States without obtaining a visa. And finally it permits the State
Department to waive interview requirements for certain very low-risk visa applicants, permitting
resources to be focused on higher risk applicants and creates a pilot for premium visa
processing.
· “Staple” green cards to advanced STEM diplomas. The proposal encourages foreign
graduate students educated in the United States to stay here and contribute to our economy by
“stapling” a green card to the diplomas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(STEM) PhD and Master’s Degree graduates from qualified U.S. universities who have found
employment in the United States. It also requires employers to pay a fee that will support
education and training to grow the next generation of American workers in STEM careers.
· Create a “startup visa” for job-creating entrepreneurs. The proposal allows foreign
entrepreneurs who attract financing from U.S. investors or revenue from U.S. customers to start
and grow their businesses in the United States, and to remain permanently if their companies
grow further, create jobs for American workers, and strengthen our economy.
· Expand opportunities for investor visas and U.S. economic development. The proposal
permanently authorizes immigrant visa opportunities for regional center (pooled investment)
programs; provides incentives for visa requestors to invest in programs that support national
priorities, including economic development in rural and economically depressed regions ; adds
new measures to combat fraud and national security threats; includes data collection on
economic impact; and creates a pilot program for state and local government officials to
promote economic development.
· Create a new visa category for employees of federal national security science and
technology laboratories. The proposal creates a new visa category for a limited number of
highly-skilled and specialized immigrants to work in federal science and technology
laboratories on critical national security needs after being in the United States. for two years and
passing rigorous national security and criminal background checks.
· Better addresses humanitarian concerns. The proposal streamlines immigration law to
better protect vulnerable immigrants, including those who are victims of crime and domestic
violence. It also better protects those fleeing persecution by eliminating the existing limitations
that prevent qualified individuals from applying for asylum.
· Encourage integration. The proposal promotes earned citizenship and efforts to integrate
immigrants into their new American communities linguistically, civically, and economically.
January 30, 2013--America’s immigration system is broken. Too many employers game the
system by hiring undocumented workers and there are 11 million people living in the shadows.
Neither is good for the economy or the country.
It is time to act to fix the broken immigration system in a way that requires responsibility from
everyone —both from the workers here illegally and those who hire them—and guarantees that
everyone is playing by the same rules.
President Obama’s commonsense immigration reform proposal has four parts. First, continue
to strengthen our borders. Second, crack down on companies that hire undocumented workers.
Third, hold undocumented immigrants accountable before they can earn their citizenship; this
means requiring undocumented workers to pay their taxes and a penalty, move to the back of
the line, learn English, and pass background checks. Fourth, streamline the legal immigration
system for families, workers, and employers.
Together we can build a fair, effective and commonsense immigration system that lives up to
our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.
The key principles the President believes should be included in commonsense immigration
reform are:
· Continuing to Strengthen Border Security: President Obama has doubled the number of
Border Patrol agents since 2004 and today border security is stronger than it has ever been.
But there is more work to do. The President’s proposal gives law enforcement the tools they
need to make our communities safer from crime. And by enhancing our infrastructure and
technology, the President’s proposal continues to strengthen our ability to remove criminals and
apprehend and prosecute national security threats.
· Cracking Down on Employers Hiring Undocumented Workers: Our businesses should
only employ people legally authorized to work in the United States. Businesses that knowingly
employ undocumented workers are exploiting the system to gain an advantage over
businesses that play by the rules. The President’s proposal is designed to stop these unfair
hiring practices and hold these companies accountable. At the same time, this proposal gives
employers who want to play by the rules a reliable way to verify that their employees are here
legally.
· Earned Citizenship: It is just not practical to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants
living within our borders. The President’s proposal provides undocumented immigrants a legal
way to earn citizenship that will encourage them to come out of the shadows so they can pay
their taxes and play by the same rules as everyone else. Immigrants living here illegally must
be held responsible for their actions by passing national security and criminal background
checks, paying taxes and a penalty, going to the back of the line, and learning English before
they can earn their citizenship. There will be no uncertainty about their ability to become U.S.
citizens if they meet these eligibility criteria. The proposal will also stop punishing innocent
young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents and give them
a chance to earn their citizenship more quickly if they serve in the military or pursue higher
education.
· Streamlining Legal Immigration: Our immigration system should reward anyone who is
willing to work hard and play by the rules. For the sake of our economy and our security, legal
immigration should be simple and efficient. The President’s proposal attracts the best minds
to America by providing visas to foreign entrepreneurs looking to start businesses here and
helping the most promising foreign graduate students in science and math stay in this country
after graduation, rather than take their skills to other countries. The President’s proposal will
also reunify families in a timely and humane manner.
Continuing to Strengthen Border Security
· Strengthen border security and infrastructure. The President’s proposal strengthens and
improves infrastructure at ports of entry, facilitates public-private partnerships aimed at
increasing investment in foreign visitor processing, and continues supporting the use of
technologies that help to secure the land and maritime borders of the United States.
· Combat transnational crime. The President’s proposal creates new criminal penalties
dedicated to combating transnational criminal organizations that traffic in drugs, weapons, and
money, and that smuggle people across the borders. It also expands the scope of current law
to allow for the forfeiture of these organizations’ criminal tools and proceeds. Through this
approach, we will bolster our efforts to deprive criminal enterprises, including those operating
along the Southwest border, of their infrastructure and profits.
· Improve partnerships with border communities and law enforcement. The President’s
proposal expands our ability to work with our cross-border law enforcement partners.
Community trust and cooperation are keys to effective law enforcement. To this end, the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will establish border community liaisons along the
Southern and Northern borders to improve communication and collaboration with border
communities, boost funding to tribal government partners to reduce illegal activity on tribal
lands, and strengthen training on civil rights and civil liberties for DHS immigration officers.
· Crack down on criminal networks engaging in passport and visa fraud and human
smuggling. The President’s proposal creates tough criminal penalties for trafficking in
passports and immigration documents and schemes to defraud, including those who prey on
vulnerable immigrants through notario fraud. It also strengthens penalties to combat human
smuggling rings.
· Deporting Criminals. The President’s proposal expands smart enforcement efforts that
target convicted criminals in federal or state correctional facilities, allowing us to remove them
from the United States at the end of their sentences without re-entering our communities. At the
same time, it protects those with a credible fear of returning to their home countries.
· Streamline removal of nonimmigrant national security and public safety threats. The
President’s proposal creates a streamlined administrative removal process for people who
overstay their visas and have been determined to be threats to national security and public
safety.
· Improve our nation’s immigration courts. The President’s proposal invests in our
immigration courts. By increasing the number of immigration judges and their staff, investing in
training for court personnel, and improving access to legal information for immigrants, these
reforms will improve court efficiency. It allows DHS to better focus its detention resources on
public safety and national security threats by expanding alternatives to detention and reducing
overall detention costs. It also provides greater protections for those least able to represent
themselves.
Cracking Down on Employers Who Hire Undocumented Workers
· Mandatory, phased-in electronic employment verification. The President’s proposal
provides tools for employers to ensure a legal workforce by using federal government
databases to verify that the people they hire are eligible to work in the United States. Penalties
for hiring undocumented workers are significantly increased, and new penalties are
established for committing fraud and identity theft. The new mandatory program ensures the
privacy and confidentiality of all workers’ personal information and includes important
procedural protections. Mandatory electronic employment verification would be phased in over
five years with exemptions for certain small businesses.
· Combat fraud and identity theft. The proposal also mandates a fraud‐resistant, tamper‐
resistant Social Security card and requires workers to use fraud‐and tamper‐resistant
documents to prove authorization to work in the United States. The proposal also seeks to
establish a voluntary pilot program to evaluate new methods to authenticate identity and combat
identity theft.
· Protections for all workers. The President’s proposal protects workers against retaliation
for exercising their labor rights. It increases the penalties for employers who hire
undocumented workers to skirt the workplace standards that protect all workers. And it creates
a “labor law enforcement fund” to help ensure that industries that employ significant numbers of
immigrant workers comply with labor laws.
Pathway to Earned Citizenship
· Create a provisional legal status. Undocumented immigrants must come forward and
register, submit biometric data, pass criminal background and national security checks, and
pay fees and penalties before they will be eligible for a provisional legal status. Agricultural
workers and those who entered the United States as children would be eligible for the same
program. Individuals must wait until the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared before
getting in line to apply for lawful permanent residency (i.e. a “green card”), and ultimately United
States citizenship. Consistent with current law, people with provisional legal status will not be
eligible for welfare or other federal benefits, including subsidies or tax credits under the new
health care law.
· Create strict requirements to qualify for lawful permanent resident status. Those applying
for green cards must pay their taxes, pass additional criminal background and national security
checks, register for Selective Service (where applicable), pay additional fees and penalties, and
learn English and U.S. civics. As under current law, five years after receiving a green card,
individuals will be eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship like every other legal permanent resident.
· Earned citizenship for DREAMers. Children brought here illegally through no fault of their
own by their parents will be eligible for earned citizenship. By going to college or serving
honorably in the Armed Forces for at least two years, these children should be given an
expedited opportunity to earn their citizenship. The President’s proposal brings these
undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.
· Create administrative and judicial review. An individual whose provisional lawful status
has been revoked or denied, or whose application for adjustment has been denied, will have
the opportunity to seek administrative and judicial review of those decisions.
· Provide new resources to combat fraud. The President’s proposal authorizes funding to
enable DHS, the Department of State, and other relevant federal agencies to establish fraud
prevention programs that will provide training for adjudicators, allow regular audits of
applications to identify patterns of fraud and abuse, and incorporate other proven fraud
prevention measures.
Streamlining Legal Immigration
· Keep Families Together. The proposal seeks to eliminate existing backlogs in the family-
sponsored immigration system by recapturing unused visas and temporarily increasing annual
visa numbers. The proposal also raises existing annual country caps from 7 percent to 15
percent for the family-sponsored immigration system. It also treats same-sex families as
families by giving U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the ability to seek a visa on the
basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner. The proposal also revises current
unlawful presence bars and provides broader discretion to waive bars in cases of hardship.
· Cut Red Tape for Employers. The proposal also eliminates the backlog for employment-
sponsored immigration by eliminating annual country caps and adding additional visas to the
system. Outdated legal immigration programs are reformed to meet current and future
demands by exempting certain categories from annual visa limitations.
· Enhance travel and tourism. The Administration is committed to increasing U.S. travel and
tourism by facilitating legitimate travel while maintaining our nation’s security. Consistent with
the President’s Executive Order on travel and tourism, the President’s proposal securely
streamlines visa and foreign visitor processing. It also strengthens law enforcement
cooperation while maintaining the program’s robust counterterrorism and criminal information
sharing initiatives. It facilitates more efficient travel by allowing greater flexibility to designate
countries for participation in the Visa Waiver Program, which allows citizens of designated
countries to visit the United States without obtaining a visa. And finally it permits the State
Department to waive interview requirements for certain very low-risk visa applicants, permitting
resources to be focused on higher risk applicants and creates a pilot for premium visa
processing.
· “Staple” green cards to advanced STEM diplomas. The proposal encourages foreign
graduate students educated in the United States to stay here and contribute to our economy by
“stapling” a green card to the diplomas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics
(STEM) PhD and Master’s Degree graduates from qualified U.S. universities who have found
employment in the United States. It also requires employers to pay a fee that will support
education and training to grow the next generation of American workers in STEM careers.
· Create a “startup visa” for job-creating entrepreneurs. The proposal allows foreign
entrepreneurs who attract financing from U.S. investors or revenue from U.S. customers to start
and grow their businesses in the United States, and to remain permanently if their companies
grow further, create jobs for American workers, and strengthen our economy.
· Expand opportunities for investor visas and U.S. economic development. The proposal
permanently authorizes immigrant visa opportunities for regional center (pooled investment)
programs; provides incentives for visa requestors to invest in programs that support national
priorities, including economic development in rural and economically depressed regions ; adds
new measures to combat fraud and national security threats; includes data collection on
economic impact; and creates a pilot program for state and local government officials to
promote economic development.
· Create a new visa category for employees of federal national security science and
technology laboratories. The proposal creates a new visa category for a limited number of
highly-skilled and specialized immigrants to work in federal science and technology
laboratories on critical national security needs after being in the United States. for two years and
passing rigorous national security and criminal background checks.
· Better addresses humanitarian concerns. The proposal streamlines immigration law to
better protect vulnerable immigrants, including those who are victims of crime and domestic
violence. It also better protects those fleeing persecution by eliminating the existing limitations
that prevent qualified individuals from applying for asylum.
· Encourage integration. The proposal promotes earned citizenship and efforts to integrate
immigrants into their new American communities linguistically, civically, and economically.