FLORIDA — Ivan Vazquez, 30, is one of roughly 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients who feels a lot calmer at the start of this year than all of 2020 after President Joe Biden introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021.

What You Need To Know

  • As one of his first moves as president, Joe Biden introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021

  • If passed, the bill would allow DACA recipients the ability to get Green Cards immediately

  • The bill would also create an 8-year path to citizenship

If the immigration bill is passed then, DACA recipients would become immediately eligible for Green Cards and three years after they get their green cards they can apply for citizenship.

“I’m really excited, but I know it’s going to be a long process and it’s not going to happen over night,” Vazquez said. “It’s a proposal. It’s not a law.”

Eddie Fernandez, a Republican policy analyst, said Democrats will still need to reach out across the aisle for support in order to pass the bill even with control of the House and Senate.

“In order for the bill to go through committee it certainly is going to have contributions from Republicans,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez said there is a chance the bill would need to be amended in order to get that support. Fernandez said both parties tend to compromise when it comes to DACA recipients but not adult undocumented immigrants who entered the country illegally.

The bill would create an 8-year citizenship pathway for undocumented immigrants who were physically in the country at the start of the year. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security can waive the provision requiring someone to be physically present in the country if they were deported on or after January 20, 2017.

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows more than 930,000 immigrants were deported in the past four years.

“Republicans are going to look at the prospective of getting in line with those who are trying to come to the United States from around the world, rather than giving them a pass for having broken the law in order to be in the country,” Fernandez said.

Even though Vazquez said he knows the bill’s passage is up in the air he’s glad there are no more talks of rescinding the program.

“I’m just glad DACA is still on and, hopefully, we can have a solution,” he said.​