At last night’s CNN Republican presidential debate focusing on national security, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the following while answering a question about immigration:
I believe ultimately you have to find some system — once you’ve put every piece in place, which includes the guest worker program, you need something like a World War II Selective Service Board that, frankly, reviews the people who are here. If you’re here — if you’ve come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home. period. If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.[emphasis added]
The Creeble Foundation [sic] is [sic] a very good red card program that says you get to be legal, but you don’t get a pass to citizenship. And so there’s a way to ultimately end up with a country where there’s no more illegality, but you haven’t automatically given amnesty to anyone.
In the abstract, such an idea — a government agency that decides whether someone without a valid immigration status gets to stay in the United States — sounds unobjectionable. Except it already exists. The immigration courts in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review already perform this function when someone is put in removal proceedings. The solution Gingrich suggests for if someone has been here 25 years, has three kids and two grandkids, has been paying taxes, obeying the law, and belongs to a local church also (kind of) exists too. How? That person might (emphasis on might) have a plausible case for cancellation of removal, a form of relief that the immigration courts can grant that pretty much does what it’s called: it cancels someone’s removal from the United States. See INA § 240A(b).
If Gingrich’s hypothetical person was put in removal proceedings, he’d have to demonstrate that he had been present in the US for more than ten years, hadn’t been convicted of any crimes, and would also have to demonstrate that his removal would result in what the law calls “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to the alien’s spouse, parent, or child, who is a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” In practice, this “exceptional and extremely usual hardship” to a U.S. citizen relative standard is a very high — but not impossible — bar to clear.
Why did I say Gingrich’s solution only “kind of” exists? His idea only “kind of” exists because someone can only seek this type of relief if he or she is put into removal proceedings in the first place, i.e., ICE charges the person with being in the U.S. without a valid immigration status. What if you wanted to actively seek out this relief on your own? People have tried, and ICE will not let you turn yourself in to start proceedings, even if you’d be eligible for relief; hence, the “kind of.”
