Long road ahead for immigration bill in House
American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: Even as Speaker John Boehner is adamant that the House will not bring to vote the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate, President Barack Obama is set for a road trip to some states that has a strong Latino population to underscore the importance of putting an immigration reform bill in place.
Boehner made it amply clear at a press conference that the GOP-controlled House is going to draft their own version of an immigration reform bill which will place greater emphasis on border security, and not consider the Senate-passed bill in its present form.
“I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill,” Boehner said on Capitol Hill, reported Politico. “The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill.”
Boehner said the House GOP members would meet tomorrow, to discuss the way forward on the immigration bill, keeping in mind “we have a broken immigration system, we have undocumented workers here in record numbers. We just can’t turn a blind eye to this problem and think it’s going to go away.”
To counter the GOP reluctance to take the Senate bill forward, Obama is going on the offensive, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Obama is likely to travel in the coming months to Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida, among others to push forward the need for immigration reform, said the Journal. And in a strategy that the GOP will find hard to counter, Obama will also argue on the road trip the importance of the GOP’s viability as a national party and their aspirations of winning back the White House would be linked to the passage of the immigration bill.
The Journal pointed out that some prominent Republicans, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, have made a similar argument, citing the GOP’s need to listen to the growing Latino vote.
The Republicans understand the importance of winning the four states Obama plans to go to, in the 2016 elections, if they want to have their candidate in the White House, and it would not look good on them if the bill were to be scuttled in the House even as Obama does the rounds there.
Fox News reported today that according to some House memos they have received exclusively, when the GOP members meet tomorrow to discuss the bill, the emphasis is going to be heavy on border security.
The memos were sent to House Republican rank and file members. One of the memos says, “If we want to avoid the mistakes of the past, we cannot allow the President to have unilateral control over the enforcement on/off switch.”
The memo also highlights proposals to create a temporary agricultural guest worker program , increase high-skilled immigration and expand E-Verify, said the Fox report.
The Washington Post, however, in a blog post, scoffed at the attempts of the House GOP to do something on immigration reform saying that: “For all the tough talk about immigration reform, the House has done nothing on border security and the Senate has. Likewise, they’ve done nothing to solve the visa overstay issue, workplace verification or the H-1B visa problem. It is well and good to vaguely declare the Gang of Eight bill insufficient, but certainly it does more for border security and these other issues than House Republicans have managed to do (which is nothing).”
According to the Post, the border issue which the GOP keeps coming back to, “is already very secure (84 percent), the Senate bill threw immense resources at the small remaining problem, and immigration to the U.S. is now less than immigra