Inside the House GOP's immigration push

FarmerJohn

Has No Life - Lives on TB
By JAKE SHERMAN and SEUNG MIN KIM | 1/15/14
House Republican leaders are within weeks of releasing their principles for immigration reform — a blueprint that will detail positions on everything from border security to legal status.

The document, which has been kept under wraps until now, will call for beefed-up border security and interior enforcement, a worker verification system for employers and earned legal status for the nation’s undocumented immigrants, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. It will also call for reforms to visa programs and a system to track those in the country legally.

The draft principles will also include a promise that immigration reform will be done on a step-by-step basis and will foreclose the possibility of entering into conference negotiations using the Senate’s comprehensive package — pledges that could soothe some Republicans.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is driving the process, wants these principles released before President Barack Obama’s State of the Union on Jan. 28.

The secret talks are taking place even as leaders doubt that such efforts will be fruitful, in part because of opposition from conservatives who sank the prospects for reform last year. That dynamic hasn’t changed. But Republicans think stating their position is important and could help chart a path forward for reform in 2015 after the midterm elections.

There are some signs that top Republicans are taking the process seriously. There have been discussions among senior Republicans about trying to trade some form of legalization for increased state and local enforcement of immigration laws — a move, depending on how it’s crafted, that could run into resistance from Democrats.

Beyond top GOP leadership, the discussions also include senior members of the Judiciary Committee and pro-immigration reform Republicans like Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida.

he most recent set of principles was discussed Wednesday morning during a meeting of Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington.

Immigration reform is an issue fraught with land mines for Republicans. Public polling shows hefty support for cleaning up what most consider a broken system. But among a House Republican Conference that has had difficulty rallying around complex legislation, the issue has run into resistance. If Republicans ignore the issue, they risk the wrath of Wall Street, Main Street, K Street and Silicon Valley.

The 2014 push, though, has its skeptics. Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he thinks the political climate is more difficult this year.

“I think so,” he said, when asked whether it will be more difficult in 2014 to pass any pieces of reform. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t things we need to do, but I think it’s been made more problematic because now people can say the president waives parts of laws he doesn’t like. And he has.”

Among rank-and-file House Republicans, there is an appetite to take up immigration reform despite skepticism about whether consensus on the issue is possible.

“Politically, it has always been a very difficult issue — very difficult, very controversial, very emotional, very difficult issue,” Diaz-Balart said. “So it’s a big ask, but I think there’s a lot of people here who are willing to do what they believe is right for the country even above personal, political considerations.”

House committees several months ago cleared five separate bills to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. Those pieces have not moved to the floor. None of them deal with the most complicated issue of reform: what to do with the millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally.

Democrats will not support any immigration bills without assurances Republicans will pass legislation to address status of those undocumented immigrants.

Since it is unlikely the House will be able to pass any legislation with only Republican support, Democrats need to be brought into this process.

House Republican leadership has ruled out the Senate’s approach: a minimum 13-year pathway to citizenship for most current undocumented immigrants.

Diaz-Balart has been working on a legalization bill to address current undocumented immigrants in the United States. The legislation, still in the works, will most likely use border-security and interior-enforcement triggers on the legalization path, with a probationary period along the pathway.

Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who has indicated some flexibility on the legalization issue, has been talking with key House Republicans on immigration and said the contours of plan being written by Diaz-Balart could win support in both parties.

“Will it be a grand deal? No,” Cuellar said of immigration reform this year. “But I think we will put enough pieces there to have a good agreement … that I think we can go in and get most of the things done.”

Trading legalization for an uptick in state and local enforcement — as some Republicans are discussing — will most likely be met with skepticism by Democrats. Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) passed legislation calling for that last summer, but Democrats vehemently rejected the bill, arguing that it would criminalize millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country.

There could be some ways to make the provision more palatable for Democrats. For example, Congress could empower state and local law enforcement officials only after current undocumented immigrants start their legalization process. This would put the focus on future illegal immigration.

House Democrats tried to pressure Republicans by releasing their own comprehensive legislation last fall, but it garnered support from just three House GOP lawmakers. For now, Democrats are mostly in a wait-and-see mode, eager to learn the details of the principles from Republican leadership.

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough came to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with the New Democrat Coalition, a group of more centrist, pro-business House Democrats. Though the meeting focused primarily on trade issues, some New Democrats pressed McDonough on the administration’s strategy for immigration reform this year.

“He said that he was definitely looking forward to the speaker bringing out his principles,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who attended the meeting, said of McDonough. He “felt like that was an indication that there is moving conversation on immigration.”

Key senators who drafted a sweeping immigration bill and have been talking with House Republicans since their legislation passed last June are optimistic on the chances that the lower chamber will move forward.

“I get the sense that there’s a mood that is at least open to options,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose former chief of staff, Becky Tallent, is now Boehner’s top immigration aide. “Part of it is the business community, part of it is the evangelicals, part of it’s organized labor. It’s the largest coalition ever behind any piece of legislation.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/...rehensive-immigration-reform-bill-102244.html
 

Green Co.

Administrator
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I believe any amnesty/legalization legislation will have a very hard time passing. With so many unemployed, even illegals down here, and both Texas Senators against it (election year for Cornyn)... there is just no empathy for those entering the country illegally. This is a really sore subject among blue collar workers, since promises & laws from the Reagan era never materialized. Even the more recent border fence was never funded to completion.

Dems or Repubs politicians here will find it a hard pill to swallow.
 

FarmerJohn

Has No Life - Lives on TB
I think that some version of the Dream Act will be passed by the House and Senate, giving those brought here as children a path to citizenship, contingent on a clean record, national service (like the military) or other acts that put them on the road to being productive, tax-paying members of society.

That's about the most that the GOP could allow without alienating the base.
 

FarmerJohn

Has No Life - Lives on TB
The G.O.P.’s Immigration Delusion
FEB. 1, 2014 Ross Douthat
THE debate over immigration reform, rekindled last week by House Republican leaders, bears a superficial resemblance to last fall’s debate over the government shutdown.

Again, you have establishment Republicans transparently eager to cut a deal with the White House and a populist wing that doesn’t want to let them do it. Again, you have Republican business groups and donors wringing their hands over the intransigence of the base, while talk-radio hosts and right-wing bloggers warn against an imminent inside-the-Beltway sellout. Again, you have a bill that could pass the House tomorrow — but only if John Boehner was willing to live with having mostly Democrats voting for it.

Except there’s one big difference: This time, the populists are right.

They’re right about the policy, which remains a mess in every new compromise that’s floated — offering “solutions” that are unlikely to be permanent, enforcement provisions that probably won’t take effect, and favoring special interests, right and left, over the interests of the citizenry at large.

A reasonable compromise, for instance, would condition amnesty for illegal immigrants on substantial new enforcement measures, to ensure that this mass legalization would be the last. But the bills under discussion almost always offer some form of legal status before enforcement takes effect, which promises a replay of the Reagan-era amnesty’s failure to ever deliver the limits on future immigration that it promised.

A reasonable immigration compromise would also privilege high-skilled immigration over low-skilled immigration, given the unemployment crisis among low-skilled native workers and the larger social crisis that threatens to slow assimilation and upward mobility alike. But the House leadership seems to favor an approach that would create a permanent noncitizen class of low-wage workers and expand guest-worker programs — a recipe for looser labor markets, continued wage stagnation and fewer jobs for the existing unemployed.

So immigration policy is problematic on the merits — and then it’s politically problematic for Republicans as well. Immigration ranks 16th on the public’s list of priorities, according to the latest Pew numbers, so it’s difficult to see how making this the signature example of a new, solutions-oriented G.O.P. is going to help the party in the near term. Whereas it’s much easier to see how it helps the Democrats: if a bill passes, it will do so with heavy Democratic support, hand President Obama a policy victory at a time when he looks like a lame duck, and demoralize the right along the way.

Admittedly, a big push for immigration reform would not be as straightforwardly idiotic as shutting down the government without clear goals or plausible demands. But it would probably have some of the same political effects: it would divide the G.O.P., perplex the public, and let the White House reap immediate political benefits no matter how the push turned out.

So why are Republican leaders flirting with the idea? In part for principled reasons — libertarianism, pro-business sentiment and “compassionate conservative” impulses all align to make comprehensive reform seem like an obvious good to many figures in the party, and to obscure its downsides and its risks.

But it’s also hard for G.O.P. elites to let go of the idea that there’s a simple, one-fell-swoop solution to their electoral difficulties. The entire post-2012 immigration reform push was born out of this hope — that a single policy shift could deliver the Hispanic vote, save the party from its demographic crisis, and (perhaps most important) make other reforms and innovations unnecessary.

This conceit was always a fond delusion, not least because most Hispanics are not single-issue voters, and their leftward tilt has always been related to broader socioeconomic concerns. So with them, as with most Americans, the problem for Republicans in 2008 and 2012 was much bigger than the immigration issue: it was a platform designed for the challenges of 1980, and rhetoric that seemed to write off half the country as layabouts and moochers. And any solution for the party, in 2016 and beyond, would have to offer much more than the same old Reagan-era script with an amnesty stapled at the bottom.

Fortunately for the Republican future, we’re finally beginning to see the right’s politicians reckon with this reality, and throw themselves into the real work of reform. Indeed, this is happening more quickly than I once expected: in just the last week alone, recent Republican forays on tax reform, poverty and prisons have been joined by a plausible health care alternative and baby steps toward a proposal to help the long-term unemployed.

But that, too, is part of what makes the leadership’s immigration fixation so perverse. For the first time since the Bush presidency, high-profile Republicans are showing an interest in policy ideas that are fresh, politically savvy and well suited to the current economic malaise. Which makes it exactly the wrong time for the party to throw itself into a furious debate over an idea that is none of the above.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-gops-immigration-delusion.html?_r=0
 

Green Co.

Administrator
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Can't dispute the above article. Republicans are stupid. I don't think they realize the number of blue-collar supporters they have/had. This non-enforcement of immigration laws, congressional mandates (like the fence & employment verification) and amnesty/legalization proposals are a direct slap in the face to those of us that have worked at the building trades and many other occupations.

This is one reason there is hope for a "conservative" party, call it Tea Party or something else, but we need a party that will support those who built this nation. Not one that is beholding to the C of C, or one that wants to tax us to death to support those that won't work.
 

niceguy

Veteran Member
A reasonable immigration compromise would also privilege high-skilled immigration over low-skilled immigration

As a high-skilled worker, I'm against letting any more of them in. Hire American engineers, who are unemployed by the 100's of thousands, if not millions.
 

Green Co.

Administrator
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niceguy, welcome to the board!

And I agree with your sentiments, there are enough Americans to employ before importing labor for any job.
 
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