Border issue vexes Congress

Facing a tight budget, lawmakers are struggling to pass even popular issues like a border fence.

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

from the November 9, 2007 edition

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Washington - Four months after the collapse of a wide-ranging immigration reform, lawmakers are making decisions on what elements of the derailed bill, if any, can be salvaged in this session of Congress.

So far, the answer is not much.

However, with public opinion running about 2-to-1 in favor of greater border security, lawmakers are scrambling to have a record on the issue to take home to voters.

Last month, the Senate gave up on the DREAM Act, after falling short of the votes needed to take up debate. The plan, which would have given children of illegal immigrants access to US colleges and universities and, eventually, to citizenship, was once viewed as one of the more likely immigration measures to pass Congress.

This week, another program with broad bipartisan support fell off the legislative agenda, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California said she was postponing plans to legalize the status of hundreds of thousands of migrant agricultural workers. She had urged her colleagues to add the guest-worker provisions in her AgJobs bill to the $283 billion farm bill now before the Senate. But she said in a statement Monday that the politics on the issue weren't promising: "When we took a clear-eyed assessment of the politics of the Farm bill and the defeat of the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform, it became clear that our support could not sustain these competing forces."

"The biggest change is in the political climate," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that opposes illegal immigration. "Before the collapse of the comprehensive amnesty bill, a lot of people thought they would pass piecemeal the DREAM Act and smaller amnesties. Now they can't even get their consolation prizes through Congress."

But pro-immigrant groups say that this week's elections, which did not produce that anti-immigrant backlash many groups predicted, send a different message.

"Immigration is clearly not the winning wedge issue that some candidates and political operatives would like for it to be," said Peter Zamora, Washington, D.C., regional counsel for MALDEF, the leading Latino legal-rights advocacy group, in a statement.

Such competing assessments of the politics of the issue are making the end-of-year spending fights even more polarized.

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