Key to reviving immigration-reform bill: tight border

President Bush pledges more agents, fencing, and cameras to save the Senate bill – in need of 15 votes to survive.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 25, 2007 edition

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Washington - 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.

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