Senate, House pursue sharply different paths to immigration reform

The House's go-slow approach is intended to help educate members from districts with tiny minority populations who have never handled immigration issues, as well as to fulfill the promises of Republican House leaders that more bills will follow the standard legislative process, by which more lawmakers have opportunities to contribute. 

The House's path has its critics, of course, who predict that the reform effort will be foiled if it is diverted from a comprehensive track.

“Rep. Goodlatte knows full well there’s a broad bipartisan bill that is likely to pass the Senate and a broad bipartisan bill that is about to be introduced in the House. Rather than truly supporting these measures, he is introducing partisan piecemeal measures that went nowhere in the last Congress,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, in a statement on Thursday.

Goodlatte’s announcement “makes it easier for opponents of broad reform to oppose comprehensive reform while claiming they support something,” Mr. Sharry continued.

Goodlatte repeatedly emphasized on Thursday that his committee is open to an eventual product from the House’s bipartisan immigration negotiating group, the Senate’s eventual product, or somewhere else.

And, he underlines, the goal is not to kill the immigration reform effort. 

“We’re certainly not doing that,” Goodlatte says. “We have been working very hard on this, and we respect the effort of others. But we encourage all of them to be careful, examine the legislation very closely, understand how each component of immigration relates to every other component so we don’t get the law of unintended consequences taking hold in this matter.”

So why go ahead with small pieces of reform, knowing that doing so raises the ire of immigration reformers?

Goodlatte says more than 100 House Republicans have attended GOP education sessions on immigration – but that represents less than half the GOP conference. By introducing pieces of the immigration puzzle one at a time, Goodlatte and Mr. Gowdy believe they can drill down on the specifics of each portion of the immigration system so that their members understand the stakes and potential solutions of each one.

The immigration education sessions have been as well-attended as the information sessions hosted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan during the debt ceiling fight of 2011, but some members are on the sidelines, Gowdy says.Introducing specific bills, Goodlatte says, will underscore the House majority's seriousness about taking on immigration reform and will encourage more members to become engaged. 

“Our function in moving legislation into the committee, so we can look at it and hold legislative hearings on it, [is that doing so] will be a wake-up call to those who haven’t done it, to say, ‘Hey, you better come down and start looking seriously at what we’re doing on immigration,’ ” he says.

In other words, the House, whose bipartisan immigration reform group has yet to produce a bill, needs to keep moving. And it must keep moving, keep educating, keep the debate flowing because of members like Representative Gowdy.

Gowdy, a former prosecutor elected during the tea party wave of 2010 who has a flair for giving booming, emotional speeches on the House floor, noted that Hispanics make up less than 2 percent of the citizens in his district in the Palmetto State. As such, his own constituents are not exactly pushing for him to take up immigration reform. 

But Gowdy says they might appreciate a policy fix that actually solves America’s long-running immigration problem.  

“This is not a political exercise to me,” says Gowdy, “which is why I appreciate so much the approach the chairman [Goodlatte] is taking. I would like a remedy that sustains us for the remainder of my lifetime. So I’m much more interested in a process that is confidence-inspiring than a political remedy.”

Previous

1 | 2