Why can't we secure the border to ensure no more illegal crossings.
Declare Amnesty for those illegals who have been here 10+ years and have been law abiding (other than by coming/working here illegally).
Let them apply for citizenship and grant them citizenship. Let's welcome them to their new civic duty of paying income taxes.
They really should pay some sort of fine for not paying income tax for those 10 years they were here if they were working.
For those who have been here less than 10 years, send them back out and let them come in again legally (provided these folks are not criminals with records of course).
This
grand bargain was proposed 14 years ago.
The Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act would have done pretty much what you suggest. George W. Bush, John McCain and Teddy Kennedy championed it. But some extremely vile people hammered it as "amnesty." Versions that called for illegal immigrants paying a fine and getting a misdemeanor record also inspired hatred, fear and threats. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 inspired much the same reaction. Everything you've thought of, others have too, including quite a few Republicans. It was not politically doable.
There is nothing, IMO, that will satisfy the "secure the borders first" crowd, except for a big, beautiful 40-foot-tall, 2000-mile long wall. In the meantime, a substantial fence act was passed and many new border agents were approved. Turns out the U.S. can't hire them fast enough to staff at these levels. It's been tried and is not even controversial, but in practice it isn't happening.
Many also went ballistic at the idea of a guest worker program that would have matched employers and temporary farm labor.
The border is never going to be secure enough to satisfy people who insist the U.S. has done nothing to make the border more secure.
And, unintended consequence: It's a viable theory that ramped-up security encouraged more family immigration. Migrant workers that used to slip in and out of the country feared they would no longer be able to do so, so rather than risk permanent separation they moved their families up here as well.
Everything you suggest is reasonable and I hope that someday soon such legislation will be viable, but at present it's not. Farm-state Republicans wouldn't even agree to mandate that all employers use E-Verify to vet potential hires. And imagine the reaction if Congress proposed a tamper-resistant, biometric ID card that would make it relatively easy to tell who is in the country legally.
Jeff Flake traded his vote on the tax cut for vague assurances that DACA issues would be fixed legislatively. Why he trusted McConnell is beyond me. That simple thing, which has a lot of legislative support, can't happen because Senate Republicans are unwilling to address it as a standalone issue.
Just in case you really believe the fix is simple, please believe me, it's not. There is a lot of hatred and fear involved as well as money, some of it from private-prison operators who want to see more people detained because they can get contracts for ludicrously expensive detention facilities. In some cases the detainees are being paid $1 to $3 a day to maintain the facilities - while operators get literally hundreds of dollars a day for each immigrant. Your tax dollars at work.
I'm not saying Democrats don't have any culpability. They do. But they are not the ones making any reasonable reform impossible. Republicans keep their heads down because there are some very nasty people out there who will make death threats to any lawmaker who proposes any halfway decent reform such as the measures you say you support.
