The U.S. immigration system can be confusing to understand and overwhelming to keep track of, especially when you look back at what happens in a year on the state and federal levels.
But federal immigration policy has real, local impacts in Omaha — where foreign-born individuals make up 10.6% of the population as of 2019 — and in Nebraska as a whole, where the labor force relies heavily on immigrants.
As 2022 begins, we want to give readers a look back at some of 2021’s most impactful moments in immigration and a glance forward at what may come.
What happened with federal immigration policy in 2021?
The start of 2021 brought hopes for big changes to the country’s immigration system. President Joe Biden entered office with goals to improve the U.S. immigration system, first by reversing controversial policies implemented by the Trump administration.
In his first days in office, Biden issued a number of immigration-policy-related executive orders, including reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. He also introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 to Congress, a bill that would create a path to citizenship for certain immigrants. Congress has not acted on the bill and instead is attempting to pass piecemeal legislation to address immigration reform.
At the start of 2021, Biden announced the Build Back Better Act, a social spending plan that included changes that could protect approximately 7 million undocumented immigrants. But as of December, those changes won’t come through the Build Back Better Act, as a senate parliamentarian rejected immigration reform included in the bill.
What about immigration legislation on the local and state levels?
In 2021, lawmakers of the Nebraska Unicameral advanced few bills explicitly related to immigration. But they did advance bills, which were signed into law, that address issues disproportionately impacting Black and brown Nebraskans. These include LB451, which deems it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of hair texture and style in the workplace, and LB51, which bans the use of chokeholds by law enforcement.
“Immigrant rights issues naturally intersect with racial justice issues,” said Jane Seu, the immigration legal fellow at the ACLU of Nebraska. When legislative decisions uplift marginalized communities and the voices and rights of people of color, they support and include immigrant communities, she said.
Nebraska Sen. Tony Vargas’s bill, LB 241, would have adopted a regulation to protect meatpacking workers, many of whom are immigrants, and other essential workers endangered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The bill did not advance during the final 2021 session, but advocates anticipate the issue could be revisited in the 2022 legislative session, which will begin on Jan. 5. Sen. Vargas is running for Rep. Don Bacon’s seat in Congress in May.
Nebraskans can also expect lawmakers to discuss LB 298, the bill to extend unemployment benefits for DACA and Temporary Protected Status holders.
“We’re the only state that doesn’t extend these benefits to these folks, so it would bring us on equal footing with the rest of the country,” Seu said.
In 2021, community-wide support for immigrants grew, advocates say.
It’s not surprising to Darcy Tromanhauser that lawmakers didn’t bring big changes to immigration policy in 2021.
“It’s been more than 35 years since Congress has taken action for positive immigration laws, which is causing unnecessary harm to Nebraska families and entire communities,” said Tromanhauser, who is the program director of the Immigrants & Communities Program at Nebraska Appleseed, a statewide nonprofit advocating for justice and opportunity for all Nebraskans.
Still, community support for positive changes in immigration policy was at a high in Nebraska in 2021, Tromanhauser said. Community members made hundreds of phone calls to legislators, met with Congress and shared their personal stories and experiences with immigration to try and push the needle on policy.
“We have community members who have lived in Nebraska for decades, contributing as part of the fabric of local communities who have no way to apply for residency and citizenship,” she said. Building a pathway to citizenship would bring stability to the state, she added, not only for immigrants but for all communities.
Until immigrants who have lived in Nebraska for a long time have a route to citizenship, Tromanhauser said, the U.S. is only repeating patterns in its history of relying on essential community members while excluding them from full participation.
Omaha also showed support for an influx of refugees in 2021. In August, it was estimated that 50,000 Afghan people would relocate to the U.S., including many to Nebraska. Upon those announcements, immigrant-serving nonprofits, such as the Refugee Empowerment Center, Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska and Restoring Dignity, as well as refugee communities of Omaha mobilized to meet the needs of those expected to arrive.
With new arrivals comes an increase in the needs for household items such as furniture, clothing and other resources that make an apartment feel like home. Restoring Dignity, a grassroots nonprofit serving new and former refugees who live in Omaha, offers refugees in Omaha free home items through its community donation center, which is located at 1205 S. 50th St.
Hannah Wyble, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said 416 families visited the donation center in 2021, and she knows 2022 will only bring more. In anticipation of this, Restoring Dignity plans to move operations to an 18,000-square-foot warehouse in 2022.
“Since there will be hundreds of people from Afghanistan resettled to Omaha, in addition to hundreds of refugees from other countries — a total of over 1,300 people being resettled in the next year — we knew we had to expand to be able to meet that furniture need,” she said.
How will immigration play into Nebraska’s elections for governor?
The start of the new year means 11 months until Nebraska’s gubernatorial elections, and immigration is already poised to be a hot-button issue for candidates on the campaign trail.
The Democratic and Republican primary elections for governor of Nebraska will be held on May 10. Carol Blood is currently the sole Democrat in the race, and Jim Pillen, Brett Lindstrom and Charles Herbster are among the Republicans running for the position.
Herbster has already built his platform with discriminatory statements akin to Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies. One advertisement made the false claim that undocumented immigrants in Nebraska “cost our state over $300 million every year.”
Herbster’s claim has no basis in fact, according to Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, the assistant vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “It erases and minimizes the billions of dollars of value that are brought to the state by immigrants and what they contribute to the community,” he said.
“Foreign-born Nebraskans pay much more into government programs than they will ever extract,” Benjamin-Alvarado said. Immigrant populations accounted for 5.8% of state contributions from income, sales and gasoline taxes and 5.2% of total state expenditures on public assistance, Medicaid and education in 2019, according to a report from UNO’s Office of Latino/Latin American Studies, or OLLAS.
When blanket statements like Herbster’s go unchallenged, they’re much more likely to become talking points that may be taken as fact by voters, Benjamin-Alvarado said.
“This is part of an intentional misinformation, disinformation line of pursuit that candidates like himself are more likely to go down,” Benjamin-Alvarado said. “Is that the kind of person we want running the state?”
Benjamin-Alvarado does not foresee much change in federal and state-level immigration policy before the May election for governor, despite public polling strongly suggesting the country should have comprehensive immigration reform.
“It’s not the hill that anybody wants to die on,” he said. “Everybody is too comfortable making the money they make off of immigrant labor with little care for the rights and the well-being of those immigrants themselves.”
So will immigration reform happen in 2022? One thing is certain for many community members: Policy decisions have direct impacts on the lives of all Nebraskans, and action is long overdue.