Has there there been a big breakthrough in the Senate’s immigration reform plan? It sounds that way:
Senators seeking a solution to a deadlock over border security have reached a tentative agreement they believe could win the votes of a significant number of Republican lawmakers for the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Republican Sens. John Hoeven and Bob Corker have been working on an amendment to the Gang bill that would satisfy Republicans who say the legislation as currently written does not have strong triggers to make the awarding of green cards, or permanent legal status, conditional on the completion of strict border control measures. A Senate aide familiar with the talks says the agreement would require that such measures be in place before immigrants could win permanent legal status.
The key feature of the deal is a massive increase in the number of Border Patrol agents. The Hoeven and Corker amendment would call for the number of agents to be essentially doubled, to about 40,000 from its current force of 20,000. “It’s hard to contend that you can’t control the border with about 40,000 Border Patrol agents,” says the Senate aide.
The deal would also call for an increase in the miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. It appears the amendment will provide for a total that is near the 700 miles of fencing called for in the Secure Fence Act, which Congress passed in 2006 but watered down a year later.
It would also call for strengthening border security infrastructure such as sensors and for truly using the E-Verify employment security system. And for a “biographic” entry-exist system at airports and other places where people can enter the United States.
And if this is what seems to be creating a consensus among some key Senators, then here is something that also created a consensus — but now what the person proposing it had in mind:
The Senate on Thursday rejected Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) immigration reform bill amendment that would have put mandatory border security triggers in place before immigrants were given legal status.
he Senate voted 54-43 to table the amendment, which was seen as crucial to get more Republican support for the legislation. But Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) are expected to release an alternative border security enforcement amendment later Thursday.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) split with his fellow GOP Gang of Eight members by voting against tabling Cornyn’s amendment, while Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) voted to kill Cornyn’s amendment.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also voted to table the amendment. Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) voted in support of considering Cornyn’s amendment.
Cornyn’s “Results” amendment would have required that the border enforcement standards in the underlying Gang of Eight bill be met before anyone could be granted permanent legal status.
If a Senate plan passes, then comes the big challenge: getting something through the Republican, tea-party and talk show influenced House where there are already rumblings that GOPers want to either kill the bill or pass something that would be unacceptable to longtime proponents of immigration reform — and then try to blame the Democrats for not cooperating with them. Which would be unwise. As your truly has also noted HERE.
SOME BLOG REACTION
—Allapundit:
If — if — you trust House Republicans to demand border security before any form of legalization, then having the Senate pass this thing with Republican support isn’t a terrible outcome. The consolation prize for Democrats if the bill fails is demagoging the GOP for being anti-Latino, which might help them with turnout in the midterms next year. If 20 Senate Republicans vote for the Gang of Eight bill, that argument is harder to make. Suddenly it becomes a message about House Republicans specifically, and House Republicans have much less to fear in their small red districts than GOP senators do. The big question mark right now isn’t how Corker/Hoeven plays in the Senate, it’s how it plays in the House. Will GOPers who’ve been talking tough lately suddenly go soft?
Exit question via Conn Carroll: CBO estimated that, of the estimated 11.5 million illegals currently in the U.S., only eight million or so would qualify for the initial probationary legalization under the Gang’s bill. What happens to the other 3.5 million?
It seems from Greg Sargent’s report on the deal this morning that immigration reform advocates are already on board with this compromise, albeit not with any enthusiasm. The two questions now are (1) how many Senate Republicans now accept the deal, and are any of them named John Cornyn? and (2) how do House Republicans react?
I’m guessing Cornyn is on board or this deal wouldn’t be getting the anticipatory hype rolling across Washington right now. But it’s hard to imagine that a compromise without hard triggers is going to fly in the House, where a majority of Republicans may well oppose having any bill at all.
Of course, only time will tell if this will be enough to get the legislation out of the Senate, and if so, whether it will force the Republican House to take action, but branding it as a “surge” is genius, because if there’s one thing that actually helps get Republicans to talk from the same page, it’s boiling everything down to a single word—preferably a word that suggests military bravado and manly excess, all in a tiny little package.
7:47 AM PT: To clarify, the proposal does create a “trigger”—but the trigger is the surge, not arbitrary, hard-to-measure, impossible-to-define statistical outcomes tied to the surge, like a 90 percent reduction in border insecurity. Effectively, passage and implementation of the bill would exercise the “surge” trigger.
As Republican senators continue to work on achieving an agreement on immigration reform, there remains a strong element within the party that opposes any bill whatsoever, regardless of what provisions might be contained within it.
I actually watched a few minutes of Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News last night. Hannity knows that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, supports comprehensive immigration reform, and he has been open-minded about the issue since shortly after the election in November. But his guest, Michelle Malkin, was completely dismissive of reform no matter how strong the border enforcement elements in the bill might be.
Malkin is an Asian-American most famous for her support of Japanese internment camps during World War Two, so she could be dismissed as a crank. But the episode is illustrative of the problem the Republicans will have getting to ‘yes.’
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.