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It’s a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach, and it’s only growing stronger. Could it be true that immigration reform is dead or close to dead?
Certainly, the prognosis looks troubling. No one thought it was going to be easy to reconcile the House and Senate bills. And now, House Republicans seem unwilling even to negotiate with the Senate. Instead they are spending the summer traveling around the country whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment at “field hearings.”
But wait a minute. Are things really so bad? I believe it is still possible – difficult but possible – that Congress will enact a reform package this year.
My thinking starts with politics – a simple calculus of who’s stronger. Listening to loudmouth critics, it’s easy to forget the powerful line-up in favor of reform: the president, the Senate, the Catholic Church and a majority of the U.S. public (poll after poll shows that between two-thirds and three-quarters of voters support a package that combines enforcement with earned citizenship for the undocumented). And though they aren’t saying so in public yet, there’s even a faction of the House Republican leadership that would like to get a bill done this year.
The opponents make lots of noise, and circumstances give them an advantage. They wield a lot of clout in a close mid-term election year when GOP incumbents need every vote they can get. But they are still only 20 to 25 percent of the public – an angry, unrepresentative tail trying to wag the dog.
My second reason for hope has to do with policy. Two new policy ideas on the table could form the basis of a House-Senate compromise. The man behind them, conservative congressman Mike Pence of Indiana, is a newcomer to immigration issues, and his plan, co-sponsored by Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, is not yet a fully workable bill. It doesn’t, for example, include adequate or practical provisions for the unauthorized immigrants already here who wish to become citizens.
But Pence’s two signature ideas – that those who want legal status should get it if they’re willing to leave the country for a week or two, and that it makes sense to combine enforcement with legalization and a guestworker program as long as we start improving enforcement
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