Obama on immigration overhaul: ‘Now is the time’

DARLENE SUPERVILLE

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

LAS VEGAS — Declar­ing “now is the time” to fix the nation’s bro­ken immi­gra­tion sys­tem, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Tues­day out­lined broad pro­pos­als for putting mil­lions of ille­gal immi­grants on a clear path to cit­i­zen­ship while crack­ing down on busi­nesses that employ peo­ple ille­gally and tight­en­ing secu­rity at the bor­ders. He hailed a bipar­ti­san Sen­ate group on a sim­i­lar track but left unre­solved key details that could derail the com­plex and emo­tional effort.

Poten­tial Sen­ate road­blocks cen­ter on how to struc­ture the avenue to cit­i­zen­ship and on whether leg­is­la­tion would cover same-sex cou­ples — and that’s all before a Sen­ate mea­sure could be debated, approved and sent to the Republican-controlled House where oppo­si­tion is sure to be stronger.

Obama, who car­ried Nevada in the Novem­ber elec­tion with heavy His­panic sup­port, praised the Sen­ate push, say­ing Con­gress is show­ing “a gen­uine desire to get this done soon.” But mind­ful of pre­vi­ous immi­gra­tions efforts that have failed, he warned that the debate would be dif­fi­cult and vowed to send his own leg­is­la­tion to Capi­tol Hill if law­mak­ers don’t act quickly.

“The ques­tion now is sim­ple,” Obama said dur­ing a campaign-style event in Las Vegas, one week after being sworn in for a sec­ond term in the White House. “Do we have the resolve as a peo­ple, as a coun­try, as a gov­ern­ment to finally put this issue behind us? I believe that we do.”

Shortly after Obama fin­ished speak­ing, cracks emerged between the White House and the group of eight sen­a­tors, which put out their pro­pos­als one day ahead of the pres­i­dent. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a poten­tial 2016 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, faulted Obama for not mak­ing a cit­i­zen­ship path­way con­tin­gent on tighter bor­der secu­rity, a cen­tral tenet of the law­mak­ers’ proposals.

“The president’s speech left the impres­sion that he believes reform­ing immi­gra­tion quickly is more impor­tant than reform­ing immi­gra­tion right,” Rubio said in a statement.

House Speaker John Boehner also responded coolly, with spokesman Bren­dan Buck say­ing the Ohio Repub­li­can hoped the pres­i­dent would be “care­ful not to drag the debate to the left and ulti­mately dis­rupt the dif­fi­cult work that is ahead in the House and Senate.”

Despite pos­si­ble obsta­cles to come, the broad agree­ment between the White House and bipar­ti­san law­mak­ers in the Sen­ate rep­re­sents a dras­tic shift in Washington’s will­ing­ness to tackle immi­gra­tion, an issue that has lan­guished for years. Much of that shift is polit­i­cally moti­vated, due to the grow­ing influ­ence of His­pan­ics in pres­i­den­tial and other elec­tions and their over­whelm­ing sup­port for Obama in November.

The sep­a­rate White House and Sen­ate pro­pos­als focus on the same prin­ci­ples: pro­vid­ing a way for most of the esti­mated 11 mil­lion peo­ple already in the U.S. ille­gally to become cit­i­zens, strength­en­ing bor­der secu­rity, crack­ing down on employ­ers who hire ille­gal immi­grants and stream­lin­ing the legal immi­gra­tion system.

A con­sen­sus around the ques­tion of cit­i­zen­ship could help law­mak­ers clear one major hur­dle that has blocked pre­vi­ous immi­gra­tion efforts. Many Repub­li­cans have opposed allow­ing ille­gal immi­grants to become cit­i­zens, say­ing that would be an unfair reward for peo­ple who have bro­ken the law.

Details on how to achieve a path­way to cit­i­zen­ship still could prove to be a major stick­ing point between the White House and the Sen­ate group.

Obama and the Sen­ate law­mak­ers all want to require peo­ple here ille­gally to reg­is­ter with the gov­ern­ment, pass crim­i­nal and national secu­rity back­ground checks, pay fees and penal­ties as well as back taxes and wait until exist­ing immi­gra­tion back­logs are cleared before get­ting in line for green cards. Nei­ther pro­posal backs up those require­ments with specifics.

After achiev­ing legal sta­tus, U.S. law says peo­ple can become cit­i­zens after five years.

The Sen­ate pro­posal says that entire process couldn’t start until the bor­ders were fully secure and track­ing of peo­ple in the U.S. on visas had improved. Those vague require­ments would almost cer­tainly make the time­line for achiev­ing cit­i­zen­ship longer than what the White House is proposing.

The pres­i­dent urged law­mak­ers to avoid mak­ing the cit­i­zen­ship path­way so dif­fi­cult that it would appear out of reach for many ille­gal immigrants.

“We all agree that these men and women have to earn their way to cit­i­zen­ship,” he said. “But for com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform to work, it must make clear from the out­set that there is a path­way to citizenship.”

“It won’t be a quick process, but it will be a fair process,” Obama added.

Another key dif­fer­ence between the White House and Sen­ate pro­pos­als is the administration’s plan to allow same-sex part­ners to seek visas under the same rules that gov­ern other fam­ily immi­gra­tion. The Sen­ate prin­ci­ples do not rec­og­nize same-sex part­ners, though Demo­c­ra­tic law­mak­ers have told gay rights groups that they could seek to include that in a final bill.

John McCain of Ari­zona, who is part of the Sen­ate immi­gra­tion group, called the issue a “red flag” in an inter­view Tues­day on “CBS This Morning.”

Wash­ing­ton last took up immi­gra­tion changes in a seri­ous way in 2007, when then-President George W. Bush pressed for an over­haul. The ini­tial efforts had bipar­ti­san sup­port but even­tu­ally col­lapsed in the Sen­ate because of a lack of GOP support.

Cog­nizant of that failed effort, the White House has read­ied its own immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion. But offi­cials said Obama will send it to the Hill only if the Sen­ate process stalls.

Most of the rec­om­men­da­tions Obama made Tues­day were not new. They were included in the immi­gra­tion blue­print he released in 2011, but he exerted lit­tle polit­i­cal cap­i­tal to get it passed by Con­gress, to the dis­ap­point­ment of many Hispanics.

Some of the rec­om­men­da­tions in the Sen­ate plan are also pulled from past immi­gra­tion efforts. The sen­a­tors involved in for­mu­lat­ing the lat­est pro­pos­als, in addi­tion to McCain and Rubio, are Democ­rats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illi­nois, Robert Menen­dez of New Jer­sey and Michael Ben­net of Col­orado, and Repub­li­cans Lind­sey Gra­ham of South Car­olina, and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Also Tues­day, in another sign of Con­gress’ increased atten­tion to immi­gra­tion issues, a group of four sen­a­tors intro­duced leg­is­la­tion aimed at allow­ing more high-tech work­ers into the coun­try, a long­time pri­or­ity of tech­nol­ogy busi­nesses. The bill by Repub­li­cans Rubio and Orrin Hatch and Democ­rats Amy Klobuchar and Chris Coons would increase the num­ber of visas avail­able for high-tech work­ers, make it eas­ier for them to change jobs once here and for their spouses to work and aim to make it eas­ier for for­eign­ers at U.S. uni­ver­si­ties to remain here upon graduation.

Posted by AP News on Jan 29 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.