After the Wall, America Still Has to Decide Who Gets a Door

A Hispanic leaders briefing brought business executives, faith leaders, civil-rights advocates and lawmakers together around an immigration question Washington still has not answered: What comes after border enforcement?

“You built the wall, but can someone please fix the door?”

Pastor Tony Suárez had found the line that cut through nearly everything else said during Tuesday’s virtual Hispanic leaders briefing. It was funny enough to stick, political enough to make a point, and simple enough to expose the problem underneath Washington’s immigration debate. Suárez, vice president and national spokesperson for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, was not arguing against a secure border. He had explicitly said the opposite. His point was that a country can decide who enters and still have to decide what to do about the millions of people who have already spent years building lives inside it.

That distinction brought together an unusual screen full of people. Business executives appeared alongside evangelical leaders. Civil-rights organizations shared space with chambers of commerce, family advocates, researchers and elected officials. UnidosUS, LULAC, NALEO, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the American Business Immigration Coalition, American Families United, America’s Voice, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Comité de 100 were among the organizations represented. More than 90 individually named participants could be seen across screenshots from the meeting. They were not ideologically interchangeable, and pretending otherwise would miss what was most interesting about the briefing.

I logged in from Virginia carrying my own version of the contradiction. As an author, coach, founder of Anchor 250 and longtime advocate for a more durable immigration settlement, I have described my position in three words: “Dignity, not amnesty.” I support securing the border and enforcing immigration law. I also reject the assumption that enforcement requires treating a Dreamer, the undocumented spouse of an American citizen, a worker who has lived in the country for decades and a violent offender as politically or morally interchangeable cases. In my view, the country needs rules tough enough to mean something and legal mechanisms durable enough to survive the next change of administration.

That put me somewhere inside Tuesday’s coalition, but not neatly inside every argument made by it. Some groups in the briefing emphasized eventual citizenship. Others focused on work permits. Business leaders spoke about labor supply and competitiveness. Civil-rights advocates attacked the breadth of current enforcement. Faith leaders spoke about people sitting in church pews. For me, the question was narrower: could Congress distinguish between amnesty and an earned legal status that requires immigrants to come forward, submit to scrutiny, satisfy financial obligations and remain accountable to the law?

That question matters because President Donald Trump’s administration has already moved the country far beyond the border politics of the Biden years. The White House says illegal crossings have fallen dramatically, removals have accelerated, enforcement resources have expanded and the government has restored operational control at the southern border. It describes that record as a public-safety and sovereignty success. Those are administration claims, and some of its broader assertions remain politically contested, but the basic policy direction is unmistakable: immigration enforcement is now central to Trump’s second-term agenda.

Tuesday’s speakers were not primarily asking Washington to reverse that border policy. They were asking a different question: What comes after it?

The answer, according to polling presented during the briefing, may be more complicated than either party’s loudest immigration rhetoric suggests. Matt Barreto of BSP Research presented results from a bipartisan survey conducted with Shaw & Co. and commissioned by the American Business Immigration Coalition and American Families United. The poll interviewed 1,353 Latino registered voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Sixty-three percent said the treatment of immigrants was one of their top issues in the 2026 election, while 75 percent said they would be more likely to support a candidate who favored work permits for long-term undocumented immigrants who had been working and paying taxes in the United States.

The most provocative number came from a forced choice between two broad approaches. Seventy-six percent selected a policy combining stronger border security with work permits and legal status for long-term undocumented immigrants. Roughly one-quarter preferred an approach focused primarily on border security and deportation. Barreto said 54 percent of Latino Republicans in the sample chose the combined approach, as did 58 percent of respondents who said they had voted for Trump in 2024.

Those numbers are politically interesting. They are not a national referendum.

The sample consists of Latino registered voters in seven states. It does not establish what every Latino voter, every Republican or every Trump voter thinks about immigration. Another question presented respondents with a choice between saying Trump and congressional Republicans had gone too far and should prioritize violent criminals while creating legal pathways for law-abiding immigrants, or saying Trump and Republicans were on the right track. The result was 71 percent to 29 percent for the first position. But that question bundles several propositions together. A respondent could support prioritizing violent offenders without agreeing with every proposed legal pathway, or oppose some enforcement tactics without rejecting the administration’s border policies. The original briefing itself acknowledged that limitation.

That distinction is crucial. Candidate preference is not legislative consent, and polling language can make complicated policy tradeoffs look cleaner than they really are. Still, the repeated pattern in the survey is harder to dismiss: among these voters, support for border enforcement did not automatically produce support for removing every undocumented person already living in the United States.

That is precisely the political territory occupied by the Dignity Act.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, and Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat whose district includes El Paso and the U.S.-Mexico border, reintroduced the Dignity Act as H.R. 4393 in July 2025. The legislation attempts something Congress has repeatedly failed to do: put border enforcement, asylum reform, employment verification, legal immigration changes and the status of long-term undocumented residents inside the same legislative bargain.

Its details matter because they complicate the easiest political label.

Under the bill, undocumented immigrants who have been continuously present in the United States since before the end of 2020 could seek admission to a seven-year Dignity Program. Participants would have to pass criminal background checks, comply with federal and state law, address back taxes, register with the Department of Homeland Security and make financial contributions required by the program. Over seven years, participants would pay $7,000 in restitution. They would periodically check in with DHS, and they would remain ineligible for federal means-tested benefits. Successful participants could obtain an indefinitely renewable legal status with work and travel authorization. The general program does not itself provide a path to lawful permanent residency or citizenship.

The bill separately treats Dreamers differently, offering qualifying young immigrants a route that can ultimately lead to lawful permanent residence. It also includes nationwide mandatory E-Verify for future hires, phased in across employers, along with border and asylum provisions.

For me, that is where the phrase “dignity, not amnesty” becomes more than branding. Amnesty, in the ordinary political sense, suggests forgiveness without meaningful consequence. The Dignity Program asks people to identify themselves to the federal government, submit biometric information, pass a criminal background check, pay restitution and taxes, remain legally accountable and continue meeting program conditions. Supporters call that earned status. Opponents can reasonably argue that allowing someone who entered or remained unlawfully to stay is still a form of legalization. But the argument should begin with what the bill actually does.

My distinction is equally important on the other side. Supporting legal status for some undocumented residents does not require embracing every immigration position advanced by every organization at Tuesday’s briefing. When a LULAC representative described long-term residents who had lived in the country for 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years, the organization argued that qualified immigrants should eventually have an opportunity to pursue citizenship. The main Dignity Program stops short of that.

That disagreement is not an editorial nuisance. It may be the story.

The coalition Tuesday was united less by a final destination than by a shared rejection of two absolutes: that border enforcement must be abandoned in the name of compassion, or that legal stability for established immigrants must be rejected in the name of enforcement.

Ashley DeAzevedo, executive director of American Families United Action, approached the issue through mixed-status households. Immigration debates, she argued, are often reduced to economic indicators such as taxes, labor supply and gross domestic product. Families experience the law differently. American citizens can have spouses, parents or children whose immigration status exposes them to detention or removal. For those households, immigration policy is not something happening at the border. It can determine whether the family remains physically together.

Suárez brought the same argument into church. Immigrants, he said, are not abstractions inside congregations. They are worshippers, friends, neighbors and coworkers. He invoked his own family history as the son of a Colombian immigrant and recalled being a child when President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Congress has spent the decades since fighting over what a durable successor to that settlement should look like.

The 1986 comparison also presents supporters of legalization with one of their hardest questions. Any new bargain will be judged not only by what happens to people already in the country but by whether it prevents another generation from ending up in the same legal limbo. That is one reason employment verification and border enforcement are not incidental additions to H.R. 4393. Mandatory E-Verify is built into the legislation itself. For supporters who want to attract skeptical Republicans, the argument is that legalization and enforcement must happen in the same law because separating them has repeatedly allowed each side to suspect the other will take what it wants and abandon the rest.

The business groups in Tuesday’s briefing approached that bargain from another direction. Ramiro A. Cavazos, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, framed immigration reform as a question of workforce development, entrepreneurship and American competitiveness. His argument was not that businesses should be exempt from immigration law. It was that an economy dependent on workers who have spent years filling jobs cannot treat their legal uncertainty as economically irrelevant.

Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, pushed much harder against the administration. She argued that the scale of federal enforcement was producing fear, civil-rights concerns and economic disruption in industries including agriculture, construction, hospitality, health care and landscaping. The Trump administration takes the opposite view, arguing that aggressive enforcement protects American workers, strengthens public safety and applies laws that previous administrations neglected.

The difference matters because there is no single “Hispanic position” hidden inside Tuesday’s Zoom grid. There were overlapping constituencies with different priorities trying to identify enough common ground to move legislation. A civil-rights organization worried about raids does not arrive at immigration reform through the same door as a chamber of commerce worried about labor supply. An evangelical leader invoking family unity may not share every objective of an organization seeking a broader citizenship pathway. A conservative who supports deporting serious criminals may still reject mass removal of established families.

I sit in that uncomfortable middle. My argument is that the country can deport people who present serious public-safety threats while refusing to define every undocumented worker, Dreamer or mixed-status spouse by the same category. I want permanent statutory protections where I believe they are warranted, rather than another temporary executive program that can be rewritten by the next president. I also want the price of legalization to be visible enough that Americans can distinguish earned status from simply ignoring the law.

That position will not satisfy immigration maximalists on either side.

For some restrictionists, any mechanism allowing an undocumented immigrant to remain is amnesty by another name. For some immigrant-rights advocates, a renewable status without a general citizenship pathway may leave people permanently short of full membership in the country where they have built their lives. The Dignity Act does not eliminate that conflict. It relocates it into the terms of the bargain.

And Congress has not yet made that bargain.

H.R. 4393 remains legislation, not law. On Sept. 17, Escobar introduced H.Res. 1560, a resolution intended to provide for House consideration of the Dignity Act. As of late September, the resolution had been referred to the House Rules Committee. That movement gives supporters another procedural vehicle, but it does not guarantee a floor vote, passage in either chamber or a presidential signature.

That reality hung over the end of Tuesday’s briefing. Speakers could point to legislation. They could point to polling. They could point to business groups, pastors, immigrant families and bipartisan congressional sponsors. None of those things, by themselves, produce 218 votes in the House, a viable path through the Senate and presidential approval.

“The most important poll,” one closing speaker said, would come from voters in November.

Maybe. But elections have been delivering immigration messages for decades, and Washington has proved extraordinarily capable of interpreting them without producing a durable immigration system.

That may be the deeper significance of Tuesday’s meeting. The people on the screen were not discovering that they agreed on immigration. They do not. They were testing whether they agree on enough.

I came to the briefing already convinced that America has spent too much time forcing immigration into false choices: enforcement or compassion, law or family, border security or legal status. I left with the same basic conviction, but with a clearer picture of the coalition trying to turn that argument into legislation. Its members disagree over citizenship, enforcement and the ultimate boundaries of reform. What holds them together is considerably narrower: secure the border, distinguish among the people already here, create legal rules that require accountability, and stop expecting temporary executive actions to substitute for legislation.

Suárez’s line survives because it reduces years of political argument to a piece of architecture.

“You built the wall, but can someone please fix the door?”

Washington has spent years arguing about how high the wall should be, who should patrol it and what should happen to people who cross it unlawfully. The next fight is about the door: whether one should exist for people who have already spent years living, working, worshipping, paying taxes and raising families in the United States; who should be allowed through it; what they should have to do before it opens; and whether crossing that threshold should lead to citizenship or simply the legal right to remain.

Those are not small disagreements. They are the substance of immigration policy.

But they are also more precise than the argument Washington usually has. And after decades of slogans, perhaps precision is where an actual immigration debate has to begin.