New York Times
By Mark Landler
January 29, 2013
President Obama is expected to embrace an ambitious proposal by a bipartisan group of senators to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, using a speech in Las Vegas Tuesday as a call to arms for one of his top legislative priorities.
Mr. Obama differs with the group on some key issues, notably whether to make a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants conditional on further tightening the nation’s borders.
But administration officials said Monday evening that the principles in the Senate proposal were largely consistent with those in Mr. Obama’s 29-page blueprint for immigration reform, which he issued in May 2011 and made a plank of his re-election campaign.
The president’s goal, the officials said, will be less to underline differences with the bipartisan plan than to marshal public support behind immigration reform. Mr. Obama, having failed to achieve that in his first term, has put it at the top of his second-term agenda.
With the senators pledging to pass a law by this summer, the White House has shelved, for now, plans to introduce its own immigration bill, the officials said. Indeed, after two years of nearly constant feuding with Congress, Mr. Obama finds himself in rare alignment with Democratic and Republican lawmakers on a major issue.
That could make Mr. Obama’s speech, at a high school in Las Vegas, a novelty in his polarized presidency: a pat on the back to Congress and a pledge to work toward a shared goal.
On Monday, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, went out of his way to say the president welcomed the senators’ plan, even though they rushed their efforts to get in front of his speech.
The four pillars in the bipartisan proposal – border security, employer enforcement, provisions for granting entry to farm workers and highly skilled engineers, and the pathway to citizenship – mirror the main components of Mr. Obama’s blueprint.
Administration officials said Mr. Obama would push for a clear path to citizenship from the outset for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, suggesting he would reject any attempts to link that to improved border security. The White House insists it has already tightened the nation’s borders.
Plenty of other hurdles remain. Republican senators including Marco Rubio of Florida are putting together their own immigration proposals that are likely to be more restrictive than the plan put forward by the bipartisan group.
House Republicans are expected to resist the concept of offering a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, though there was talk on Monday of attempts to find a bipartisan approach in the House as well.
In his address, Mr. Obama is expected to fill in the details of his own plan, though the officials declined to give specifics in advance. They said the speech would be the first step in a months-long campaign to build public support for immigration reform.
The president’s choice of Nevada as the locale for the speech underlines the political threat that immigration poses to Republicans. Mr. Obama beat his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, by more than six percentage points in the state, though Nevada’s economy was devastated by the housing collapse. Much of the President’s was due to a surge of support from Hispanics.
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