Text size:

Immigration bill on fall agenda

BY AUDREY DUTTON AND TOM BRUNE | Newsday Washington Bureau

September 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - With immigration reform stymied by a fractured GOP, Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) and other House Republican leaders sought to salvage the issue for their fall campaigns yesterday by announcing they would craft new legislation to toughen the borders and police the interior.

At a Republican-only forum in the Capitol, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said the 21 immigration hearings that House committees held in 13 states this summer show that Congress must do more about border security. "It is an emergency that Congress must address before November," Hastert said.

The House GOP will address the issue piecemeal, with amendments to other legislation and attachments to appropriations bills, an aide said. No specifics were spelled out.

The forum came after top Republicans in both the House and Senate declared last week that they would not try to resolve the deadlock over their existing, and competing, bills before the Nov. 7 election.

"This is a political game," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). "They haven't even told us what they are planning to propose."

Democrats say they intend to run this fall on the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration bill - with a guest-worker program and path to citizenship for illegal workers already here - that is backed by a Republican president.

But Hastert and others made clear that their hearings this summer had determined what they had set out to find: The House enforcement-only bill is needed but the Senate's bill would be a costly mistake.

"Border control agents are almost in a state of war," said King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Congress's priority "must be border enforcement first."

King said the porous border has "almost become a metaphor for government not working properly."

In a separate briefing yesterday morning, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Congress would send the president a series of border initiatives this year.

Boehner said the initiatives would include more patrols and more fencing, as well as stepped-up policing for illegal immigrants in the U.S. interior by local and state officers as well as federal agents.

Supporters of the Senate's comprehensive bill dismissed yesterday's House GOP forum. "It is clear that workable border security and immigration reform will have to wait until next year," said Frank Sharry of the pro-immigrant National Immigration Forum.

"Rather than saber-rattling, chest-thumping, and ranting, the American people would like to see both parties and both Houses of Congress come together to negotiate a realistic and enforceable policy for immigration."