María Elvira Salazar and Verónica Escobar renewed their bipartisan Dignity Act on July 15 of last year, reviving a proposal that would regularize the status of undocumented migrants with deep roots in the United States without offering amnesty or a direct path to citizenship. The bill, H.R. 4393, is built around a legal status that can be renewed and, after seven years, can lead participants to apply for the Estatus de Dignidad.
The plan would cover people who were in the United States before December 31, 2020, and would let them stay indefinitely with work authorization if they keep a clean legal record. It also folds in the Dream Act, which would give young people who arrived in childhood a conditional status for 10 years and a route to permanent residence through work, military service or higher education.
What makes the proposal stand out is the financing model. Salazar says the law would pay for itself, with border infrastructure and processing costs covered by a 1 percent Migration Infrastructure Tax on the wages of people granted work permission under the program. The proposal says that tax would do more than cover expenses and could help reduce the national debt.
It also directs the nation’s workforce policy. The American Worker Fund would be financed with restitution payments from immigrants estimated at US$70 billion and used to train American workers in high-demand trades, with one U.S. worker trained for every participant in the Dignity Program. As Salazar put it: “Por cada participante del Programa Dignidad, se capacitará a un trabajador estadounidense.”
The political value of the bill is in its framing. Salazar and Escobar are presenting it as a bipartisan immigration answer that rejects both amnesty and automatic citizenship while still creating a path to legal stability for long-settled migrants. The unresolved question is whether that balance can hold in a debate that has long split over enforcement, status and the price of compromise. For now, the bill’s promise is concrete: legal status, work authorization and a financing structure its sponsors say can stand on its own.