Yesterday, the Senate Gang of 8 formally announced its comprehensive immigration reform bill: the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. The mammoth 844-page bill is a daunting read, as it attempts to address numerous aspects of our broken immigration system, from border security to legalization to DREAMers to employment-based immigration. The bill proposes to generate new pathways to citizenship, enhance entry-exit monitoring, fortify our borders, redefine long-established immigration terms, create visas, and eliminate certain benefit mechanisms such as the family-based 4th preference category and the Diversity Visa Program.
For the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., their U.S. citizen and permanent resident family, and the nation at large, the pathways to citizenship are a key component of the bill. However, trying to parse through the hundreds of pages of legislation to fully understand those legalization and citizenship provisions is no simple task. If only someone could glean the citizenship highlights and put them into an accessible and instructive format. That’s where the talented Ritchie King comes in. As you can see, Ritchie, of the online news site Quartz, managed to create a flow chart for the proposed citizenship pathways that is informative, user-friendly, and visually impressive.
While even the Gang of 8 acknowledged that the bill is bound to change with committee hearings and floor debates, the graphic below should prove extremely helpful. Enjoy, and be sure to thank Ritchie for this great graphic.
Ritchie King
Ritchie King is a reporter and visual storyteller at Quartz, focusing on infographics and interactive features. Created in 2012, Quartz is a digitally native news outlet for business people in the new global economy. Quartz publishes creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview, built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones. Please visit Quartz and check out Ritchie’s other work.
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