Immigration Law

CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS TURN UP THE RHETORIC ON IMMIGRATION

By Greg Siskind

Hopes by some supporters of GOP presidential candidate John McCain that Republican members of Congress would tone down efforts to make immigration a wedge issue in the lead up to the November election are being dashed. McCain is hoping to avoid the defection of large numbers of Hispanic voters to the Democrats and has hoped to convince those voters that the GOP is not an anti-immigration/anti-Hispanic party. 40% of Hispanics voted for President Bush in 2004, but recent polls suggest that as few as 10% of the 18 million Hispanic voters in the country plan on voting Republican this fall, a margin large enough to change the outcome in several states with large Hispanic populations.

Congress Daily (sorry, I can't provide a link because a subscription is required) reports that House Republicans are pushing to bring up the Shuler SAVE Act, a tough immigration enforcement bill, through an unusual legislative measure - a "discharge". The bill contains no measures to fix the broken legal immigration system or to deal with the large population of unlawfully present immigrants. The bill has not been brought up for a vote in the House Immigration Subcommittee and Republicans are hoping to bypass through a discharge petition that involves collecting signatures from the majority of House members (218) to force the bill to be voted on by the entire House. GOP members hope to get 170 signatures from there own party and 48 "Blue Dog" conservative Democrats. The odds of succeeding are not great since even some of the Democratic co-sponsors of the bill say they won't sign the discharge petition. Also, many Democrats are discussing potentially adding pro-immigration provisions as amendments if the bill moves forward.

McCain campaign officials have indicated they are supportive of the discharge, but Congress Daily reports that Republican leaders are trying to reach McCain to personally weigh in.

In the Senate, a group of mostly Southern members have formed a new Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus to ratchet up the rhetoric. The group introduced a series of a dozen new bills yesterday, almost all of which focus on immigration enforcement.

The measures introduced are varied. One would punish countries that refuse to accept their deported citizens. Senator Alexander's very good bill on facilitating English language learning that was introduced as an amendment to last year's comprehensive bill is also in there. Harsher bills have been introduced by the most anti-immigration members of the Senates - DeMint (R-SC), Sessions (R-AL), Vitter (R-LA) and Coburn (R-OK). Some are English-only measures that don't have anything to do with illegal immigration. Others punish cities where police don't try and turn unlawfully present immigrants over to ICE. And others are focused on employer sanctions.

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).