Ahead of an anticipated floor debate on immigration this week, a group or Republican Senators released on Sunday night a bill that largely tracks the “four pillars” contained in trump’s State of the Union address. GOP Senators Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, James Lankford, Thom Tillis, David Perdue, Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst are behind the bill.
It does, on the positive side, introduce a path to legalization for the DACA-eligible, over a course of 12 years (with two years’ credit for current DACA recipients).
But, it also eliminated most family-based categories other than those for spouses and children (it does grandfather those currently in the process), eliminates the Diversity lottery while reallocating those visa numbers toward the existing family and employment-based backlogs, and allocates $25 Billion (Billion with a “B”) to a border security trust fund to, among other things, build the “wall.”
It isn’t anticipated that such a bill would have the required 60 votes needed to advance further.