Immigration

Congress rarely passes one big immigration law. It moves dozens of narrower bills, each settling one question: who gets detained, who gets a visa, who can be hired, who counts as a citizen. Where a member stands is the sum of those smaller answers. The measures divide by party in a familiar way: the two poles draw cosponsors almost entirely from one side or the other, and the few genuinely cross-party bills draw real support from both.

One set would tighten enforcement. The bill furthest along is already law: it requires the federal government to detain immigrants without legal status who are arrested for theft-related crimes, for assaulting a police officer, or for a crime causing death or serious injury, and it lets states sue over enforcement decisions. A second law, passed through the budget-reconciliation process, put about $70 billion into border and interior enforcement through 2029. Others have passed the House or wait in committee: longer sentences for illegal reentry, a nationwide requirement that employers verify work eligibility, a mandate that asylum seekers wait in Mexico during their cases, a cutoff of federal funds to jurisdictions that limit cooperation with immigration agents, and a redefinition of citizenship so that a child born here is a citizen only if a parent is a citizen or permanent resident.

One bill draws close to equal support from both parties, and only one. Sponsored by a Republican, it pairs border-security funding and mandatory work verification with a renewable legal-status program for people already here and a path to residence for those brought as children. It is the sole measure on this page backed in real numbers by both sides, because it offers each side something it wants.

A third set would widen legal immigration and protect people already here. Several are bipartisan: one lets foreign-trained doctors stay to practice in communities short of physicians, one keeps young people who grew up here on their parents' visas from losing their status at adulthood, and one gives farmworkers an earned path to legal status while reworking the agricultural visa program. Two more are effectively one-party: a path to permanent residence for people brought here as children and for holders of Temporary Protected Status, and a bill to clear the green-card backlog by recapturing unused visas and loosening the caps.

That changes how to read the numbers below. On this issue the strongest signal is one-sided, and the reason is procedural, not editorial. The enforcement bills reached the floor. Two became law, with recorded votes in both chambers, and several passed the House, so those members are on the record by name. The bills that would widen legal immigration all sit in committee, where the only measure of support is who signed on as a cosponsor. So the two kinds of evidence do not carry the same weight: a recorded vote places every member, while cosponsorship places only those who put their name down. Where a measure became law through the budget process, its vote fell almost entirely along party lines, and that is noted so it is not misread as a stand-alone position.

The words here are chosen to describe what each bill does, not to take a side. This page says "immigrants without legal status," not "illegal aliens" or only "undocumented"; "a path to legal status," not "amnesty"; "jurisdictions that limit cooperation with enforcement," not "sanctuary cities." Where a bill uses a program's formal name, so does the page.

None of these bills is endorsed here. They are chosen because together they map the real range of what Congress is weighing, from mandatory detention to a path to citizenship, and because each vote and cosponsorship is a documented fact you can check yourself in the record linked below.