CQ (Article by David Harrison): Sen. Marco Rubio’s eagerly awaited immigration proposal likely won’t be introduced this year now that President Obama has granted young illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation, the senator’s spokesman said Monday.
Rubio, a Florida freshman and potential GOP vice presidential contender, spent the past three months working on an alternative to the Democrats’ DREAM Act, which would legalize the status of young undocumented people brought to the country illegally by their families. His efforts had generated publicity and some tentative support from Democrats and immigration advocacy groups, even though it would not have offered a direct path to citizenship, a cornerstone of the Democrats’ proposal.
On June 15, Obama announced that the Homeland Security Department would no longer deport young people who came to the country illegally through no fault of their own, provided that they enroll in school or join the military. That announcement drew cheers from activists and denunciations from conservatives, while also undercutting Rubio’s efforts to garner support for a compromise DREAM Act.
“The president’s announcement took a lot of the urgency out of the issue and inflamed the politics on all sides, making the prospect for any consensus legislation much more difficult,” said Alex Conant, Rubio’s spokesman. “We haven’t made a final decision on the way forward, but I think the prospects for passing something this year are significantly diminished. The president took a lot of momentum out of our legislation by making his move.”
As recently as last week, Rubio was meeting with senators and activists to iron out the details of his proposal, Conant said. Rubio was close to reaching a consensus agreeable to all sides in the Senate, having resolved all but a handful of details.
“We had paper that we were working on with other offices and we were looking at presenting it to the wider [Republican] conference in the next couple of weeks,” Conant said. The bill then would have been sent to the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office before being formally introduced sometime this summer, he said.
The White House did not give Rubio advance warning that the announcement was coming, Conant said, leaving him to learn about it from news coverage.
Both the president and congressional Democrats have acknowledged that Obama’s announcement will not be a permanent solution. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., once again called on the Senate to pass the Democrats’ DREAM Act (HR 1842, S 952), which the chamber has rejected.
“The onus is now on Congress to protect the DREAMers and fix our broken immigration system once and for all,” Reid said, referring to the common term for those who stand to benefit from the DREAM Act.
Even though Obama’s announcement has the same immediate effect as Rubio’s proposal would, future administrations could easily reverse the president’s action. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has criticized Obama’s move but has not said whether he would let it stand should he win in November.
By contrast, the measure envisioned by Rubio would be a “permanent change,” Conant said.
Conant did not rule out picking up the issue again next year, “but in terms of actually passing something, it was a big setback.”
No comments:
Post a Comment