Biden's immigration plan is in the House

Democrats will introduce Biden’s immigration bill today; the UK plans to deliberately infect healthy people with Covid-19 for a new trial.

Tonight's Sentences was written by Gabby Birenbaum.

• House Democrats introduced the White House’s immigration plan, which would create an eight-year pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a three-year process for farmworkers, DREAMers, and Temporary Protected Status holders. [Vox / Nicole Narea]
• The new citizenship laws, if passed, would apply to those who were in the country before 2021, in order to avoid a border surge, and are contingent on criminal and national security background checks, taxes, and application fees. [Guardian / Lauren Gambino]
• The bill also addresses backlogs throughout the immigration system by recategorizing who counts toward annual thresholds, authorizing greater funding for counsel in asylum cases, increasing diversity visas, and attempting to address root causes by investing in Central America and anti-narcotics forces. [CNN / Priscilla Alvarez and Lauren Fox]
• Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) will introduce the bill in each chamber. The bill faces tough odds in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to become the first major immigration bill to make it through the chamber in 25 years. [The Hill / Rebecca Beitsch]
• Biden officials have said the president is open to negotiating with Republicans, but the bill likely contains a bunch of nonstarters for the GOP, like ending construction on the border wall and making the legal status checking program E-Verify non-mandatory — not to mention offering approximately 11 million people a path to citizenship. [Washington Post / Maria Sacchetti]
• Even if the final bill is different from Biden’s proposal, Sanchez said Democrats have a sense of urgency around getting at least some portions of the policy passed. [USA Today / Rebecca Morin]
• Some members of the Democratic caucus, including House members from border districts in Texas and senators from purple states, will be wary of the perception that Democrats are going too far on immigration. Republicans are already exploiting that line of argument. [Politico / Sabrina Rodriguez and Marc Caputo]
• Biden and immigration activists alike are ready to pursue what they call a “smaller trains” strategy even as they attempt to negotiate the larger bill. Such targeted approaches would create pathways to citizenship for individual groups, like DREAMers or farmworkers, through piecemeal legislation. [NYT / Michael D. Shear]