Key to reviving immigration-reform bill: tight border

With a crucial vote looming, supporters of the Senate's immigration-reform bill are redoubling efforts to convince the public – and 15 of their Senate colleagues – that the US will enforce the law.

President Bush is pledging $4.4 billion in immediate, must-spend funding to pay for more border patrol agents, fencing, and cameras.

"As the Senate takes up this critical bill, I understand that many Americans have concerns about immigration reform, especially about the federal government's ability to secure the border," he said in his weekly radio address Saturday.

On Friday, top GOP advocates of the bill proposed a 10-point enforcement amendment, which they say will be the first offered on the floor, if the Senate agrees Tuesday to take up a revised bill.

During a previous two weeks of floor debate – and amid ongoing angry phone calls, e-mail, and attack ads – supporters of a "grand bargain" on immigration took a drubbing from critics who are saying, "It's 1986 all over again."

That 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act "was supposed to solve our illegal immigration problem once and for all. Instead, it quadrupled it," said Sen. David Vitter (R) of Louisiana, at a press briefing on Thursday.

After the bill fell 15 votes short on a key procedural vote June 7, Senate majority leader Harry Reid pulled it. He challenged its supporters to come up with more GOP votes and urged Mr. Bush to get more involved.

But moves to limit the amendments that would be allowed on the Senate floor in a renewed immigration debate angered some conservatives, who said that key concerns that deserved a hearing, especially enforcement issues, were being stifled.

In recent days, several senators who once supported the notion of a new guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for some 12 million people now in the country illegally, said they could no longer support the bill mainly over concerns that it cannot be adequately enforced.

Existing law already provides for the construction of 700 miles of fencing, 23,000 new border patrol agents by 2010, enforcement of employer sanctions, and completion of a biometric exit and entry system by 2005. Yet none of these promises were kept, critics say.

"It's one thing to take the government at its word in 1986 and then to see what they're not able to do and not willing to do, but it's another thing when we do the exact same thing again on a much bigger scale," says Sen. Jim DeMint (R) of South Carolina on Thursday.

One example of a clearly unworkable feature of the proposed law, according to Senator DeMint, is the 24-hour limit for background checks on those currently in the country illegally who are seeking probationary status. "If they can't do the background check in 24 hours, you get your probationary status anyway," he said.

Page: 1 | 2