11 Million Stories: The Case for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Imagine a situation where you’ve committed to spending the rest of your life with someone you love only to realize that you can’t be together. Imagine being separated from your child for over a decade and missing their major childhood milestones—from birthdays to graduations. Imagine suddenly finding out that you’re a citizen of a foreign land, a place you can no longer remember, and that the country you call home doesn’t acknowledge you as one of its own. Unfortunately for millions of our friends, neighbors, coworkers and loved ones, this isn’t the stuff of imagination, it’s an everyday reality.  

I receive calls from constituents on a daily basis describing the hardship and toll our broken immigration system has taken on their family and listen to their pleas for help. My congressional office has one of the highest volumes of immigration cases in the state, and the stories that are shared with me are heartbreaking.  

The current wait time for many family members to reunite in the U.S. can be 10 years or more. For LGBT families, the opportunity to reunite doesn’t even exist. “DREAMers” who came to the United States as young children and are pursuing a college degree or serving in the military may have limited or no career opportunities and are stuck in endless limbo.  

The time has come for Congress to enact meaningful reform to improve our outdated immigration system and we may finally have the bipartisan will to provide relief to the millions of families. I applaud the group of eight Senators from both sides of the aisle that has put forward a comprehensive immigration reform package which would provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, reduce our immigration backlog, and allow our country to attract the world’s brightest and highest-skilled workers to help us better compete in a global market. Their proposal would continue efforts to secure our borders, require undocumented immigrants to pay back taxes and study English and hold employers who hire unauthorized workers accountable.  

However, the Senate proposal still needs work and improvement and any final package needs to include those who have been left out of our system in the past, and allow all families—including LGBT families—to reunite.  

The path forward needs to be expeditious, safe, fair, humane and inclusive, but I have never been more optimistic about the opportunity to repair our broken system and bring 11 million immigrants out of the shadows.

It’s time we get this done.

Congressman Adam Schiff serves in the U.S. House of Representatives and represents West Hollywood.