Why This Proposal Requires No Act of Congress

The United States has not enacted comprehensive immigration reform legislation in nearly four decades. Since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, every major congressional effort to address asylum system structure, undocumented presence, and labor participation pathways has collapsed before reaching the President's desk. The administrative alternative proposed in this comment does not require — and should not wait for — congressional authorization that historical precedent demonstrates will not arrive.

A.1 The Documented History of Congressional Failure (2001–2024)

Sources: NBC News Congressional Immigration Timeline (May 2023); Brookings Institution (July 2024); ProPublica (Feb. 2020); The Hill (Feb. 2024).

The pattern is unmistakable and consistent across administrations of both parties: the Senate has produced reform legislation on multiple occasions, and the House or a Senate minority has blocked it every time without exception. The 2024 failure is the most striking: even when Democrats were willing to accept enforcement-centric legislation that prior generations would have considered unthinkable, the bill was blocked preemptively for electoral advantage.

The conclusion is not partisan — it is structural. Immigration reform requires 60 Senate votes to survive cloture, bipartisan House agreement, White House alignment, and interest group neutralization — a confluence of conditions that has not existed and is not imminent.

A.2 What This Means for the Proposed Administrative Framework

Because Congress has repeatedly failed to create a lawful workforce participation mechanism for the population that currently uses the asylum queue as its only available administrative posture, the Department bears both the operational burden and the practical responsibility to act within its existing authority. The compliance-registration framework proposed in the primary comment does not seek congressional authorization because none is required — and because waiting for it would guarantee inaction for an indeterminate period.

The compliance-registration framework described in the primary comment is not a new immigration classification, a pathway to permanent residence, or an expansion of statutory eligibility. It is a reorganization of administrative case processing combined with an exercise of existing enforcement discretion authority. All components are within the Department's current regulatory power.

B.1 Statutory and Regulatory Foundation

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) grants the Secretary of Homeland Security broad authority to administer and enforce immigration law, including authority to establish processing procedures, determine enforcement priorities, issue employment authorization documentation by regulation, and exercise prosecutorial discretion regarding removal proceedings. 8 U.S.C. § 1103(a)(1) vests in the Secretary authority over "the administration and enforcement of [the INA] and all other laws relating to the immigration and naturalization of aliens." 8 C.F.R. § 274a.12 establishes employment authorization categories through regulation — categories that the Department modifies through notice-and-comment rulemaking, not through congressional enactment.

B.2 Controlling Precedents for Administrative-Only Immigration Action

B.3 DACA vs. ECI Compliance Track — Legal Risk Comparison

B.4 Specific Administrative Steps DHS Can Take Right Now

In summary: the Department does not need legislation. It needs a rulemaking docket, an internal policy memorandum on enforcement priorities, a systems integration directive to establish the ECI verification portal, and a regulatory amendment to 8 C.F.R. § 274a.12. All four are within routine DHS administrative operations.

The program can be operational within a single administrative rulemaking cycle. No Congressional vote. No Senate confirmation. No Presidential legislation. Only notice-and-comment rulemaking — the same process used to publish this proposed rule.

The compliance-registration framework is not an act of charity toward asylum applicants. It is a structural correction that channels existing economic participation into a monitored, tax-reporting, law-compliant framework. The data below documents what immigrants — including those in unauthorized status — currently contribute to the United States economy, and what expanded, formal compliance pathways would amplify.

C.1 Tax Contributions: Verified Federal and Institutional Data

Sources: Axios / U.S. Census ACS Data (March 2025); ITEP (2024); Congressional Budget Office (April 2024).

Notably, in 40 of 50 states, undocumented immigrants pay state and local income taxes at a higher effective rate than the top 1 percent of income-earning households — because they cannot claim most tax credits and often do not file for refunds to which they are entitled. A compliance-registration pathway with mandatory ECI-linked tax reporting would increase collection accuracy and eliminate underpayment resulting from non-filing, directly benefiting Treasury without new legislation.

C.2 Housing: Rent Payments, Property Taxes, and Housing Wealth

Sources: American Immigration Council (Feb. 2025); Americas Society / Partnership for a New American Economy.

Research by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor, analyzing county-level Census data from 1970 through 2010, found that each immigrant settling in a county adds on average 11.5 cents to the value of the average home in that county. For every 1,000 immigrants settling in a county, approximately 250 U.S.-born individuals follow — drawn by increased economic opportunity the immigrant population generates. In declining Rust Belt cities, immigrant settlement has measurably prevented further collapse in home values. Immigrants are not a drain on housing markets: they are the primary mechanism by which those markets retain value.

Property taxes paid directly and indirectly through rent fund the same public school districts, county infrastructure, and emergency services used by all residents. Immigrants' rental and property tax payments support American public institutions regardless of their immigration status.

C.3 Consumer Spending, Business Creation, and Job Generation

Sources: U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (Dec. 2024); Economic Policy Institute (2024); American Immigration Council (2025).

Immigrants compose approximately 14.3 percent of the U.S. population but produce 18 percent of total U.S. economic output — a productivity premium that reflects both labor force participation rates and entrepreneurship. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that during the immigration surge of 2022–2024, higher immigration boosted payroll job growth by an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 jobs per month. This is not job displacement — it is job creation, because immigrants function as both workers and consumers.

C.4 Public Schools, Social Security, and Medicare

Property taxes paid by immigrant renters and homeowners — $10.4 billion per year in property taxes from undocumented immigrants alone — directly fund the public school systems that serve all children in the district. Immigrant parents are not recipients of a service they do not pay for; they fund it at rates proportional to or exceeding their use.

On Social Security and Medicare: undocumented immigrants paid $32.3 billion in federal payroll taxes in 2022 while being categorically ineligible to collect Social Security retirement benefits or Medicare. The Social Security Administration's own actuarial baseline notes that for every reduction of 400,000 immigrants below projected annual net migration, there will be an 11 percent shortfall in Social Security revenue. Immigrants are not straining these programs — they are subsidizing them for American retirees.

C.5 What a Compliance-Based Work Authorization Track Would Add

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated explicitly that providing formal work authorization to undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions beyond the $96.7 billion already collected — because authorized workers earn higher wages, file taxes more accurately, and collect fewer unreported-labor exemptions. The ECI compliance track would produce exactly this effect: it converts unmonitored labor participation into verified, tax-reporting, employer-registered employment — increasing federal and state revenue from the same population already present.

The compliance-registration track does not add an economic burden. It formalizes an economic contribution that already exists.

D.1 The Security Case for the Compliance Track

The primary comment's compliance-registration mechanism is built around a security-first enrollment sequence. Before any individual receives an Employment Compliance Identifier, the program requires:

• Identity verification through biometric registration — fingerprints, photograph, and biographic data entered into the DHS biometric database.
• Background screening — criminal history checks, national security database queries (TECS, NCIC, IDENT), and cross-referencing with Interpol and terrorism watchlists.
• Address registration and ongoing reporting — individuals are legally located, documented, and required to maintain updated address records with the Department.
• Employer registration — every employer who hires an ECI participant is recorded in a federal verification portal, creating a documented employment trail for law enforcement access.
• Continuous compliance monitoring — criminal convictions result in automatic program termination and return to immigration enforcement proceedings.

The current alternative — individuals using the asylum queue as a legal holding position with minimal ongoing compliance requirements — produces worse security outcomes. The asylum backlog has grown to 3.9 million cases with adjudication timelines of four or more years. During that period, many applicants are not subject to the continuous, active monitoring that the ECI compliance track imposes. The program does not reduce security oversight — it increases it by replacing passive queue membership with active, documented compliance tracking.

D.2 Preserving the Asylum System for Genuine Refugees

The United States refugee and asylum system was designed, under the Refugee Act of 1980 and consistent with the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, to provide protection to individuals facing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. That protection function is being administratively diluted by the presence of 3.9 million pending cases.

The compliance-registration track does not weaken the asylum system — it restores it. By creating a domestic administrative alternative for individuals whose objective is regulated presence rather than protection adjudication, the program allows the Department to concentrate adjudicative resources on the population for whom the system was designed: individuals facing genuine persecution who need and deserve timely review.

D.3 Labor Force Integrity

The ECI compliance track addresses a gap that neither Congress nor prior administrations have adequately closed: the existence of a large workforce of economically contributing individuals who are operating outside formal labor compliance structures — not by choice, but because no accessible compliance pathway exists for them. The result is a structural asymmetry that harms workers (who cannot enforce labor rights), employers (who face legal uncertainty), and government (which cannot fully monitor or tax the activity). The compliance track converts this gray-market participation into monitored, tax-reporting, employer-verified employment — benefiting all three stakeholders without creating new immigration eligibility.

E.1 What Is NOT Required

To ensure clarity on the scope of authority already held by the Department, the following items are expressly not required to implement the compliance-registration track:

• An Act of Congress. The INA already grants the Secretary authority to administer and enforce immigration law, to designate employment authorization categories by regulation, and to exercise enforcement discretion. No new statute is needed.
• A Senate vote. Employment authorization categories and enforcement priority policies are established through rulemaking and guidance, not legislation. The Senate plays no role.
• Presidential legislation. The President's role is limited to policy direction within the executive branch. The mechanism proposed operates under existing statutory authority delegated to the Secretary.
• A new appropriation. Implementation uses existing DHS infrastructure: USCIS intake systems, biometric enrollment hardware, background screening databases, and enforcement priority frameworks already in operation.
• A constitutional amendment. Nothing in the proposal alters citizenship eligibility, constitutional rights, or the INA's statutory categories. It reorganizes administrative processing — the kind of executive action courts have upheld repeatedly.

The mechanism proposed is simpler than DACA in legal structure, narrower in scope, grounded in existing statutory authority, fully compliant with the APA from inception, and more directly aligned with the Department's operational objectives than the regulation currently under comment.

The immigration system's current administrative dysfunction is not the result of unclear law. The Department has authority to act. The system is dysfunctional because the structural incentives facing applicants — no lawful labor alternative, a ten-year departure penalty, and a four-year adjudication queue — produce rational behavior that places non-protection filings in the humanitarian system, inflates the backlog, and delays genuine refugees.

Congress will not fix this. The documented record of 23 years of comprehensive reform attempts — each failing for structural, not substantive, reasons — establishes that legislative relief is not forthcoming. The DREAM Act has been introduced every Congress since 2001. The Gang of Eight bill passed the Senate with 68 votes and died in the House without a floor vote. The 2024 bipartisan border bill — the most enforcement-centered Democratic-supported legislation in a generation — was killed before debate for electoral considerations. Congress is not a reliable vehicle for immigration system corrections.

The President can direct policy within existing authority, but statutory change requires Congress. The compliance-registration track requires neither. It is an administrative reorganization of case processing within existing statutory authority — exactly the kind of action the Department already performs through rulemaking.

The proposal:

• Reduces the asylum backlog directly — by case withdrawal at enrollment, not by behavioral deterrence.
• Protects genuine refugees — by concentrating adjudicative resources on protection claims.
• Enhances security — by replacing passive queue membership with active biometric monitoring and employer verification.
• Increases tax revenue — by converting unmonitored labor into ECI-registered, payroll-reported employment.
• Adds to housing and consumer markets — by formalizing the participation of individuals already present and contributing.
• Creates no new immigration category — and confers no status, no permanent residence, and no citizenship pathway.
• Requires only DHS administrative action — through notice-and-comment rulemaking already authorized by statute.