As August winds down and with it, the five-week Congressional recess, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is reiterating how he thinks lawmakers in the House should tackle immigration reform once it gets back in session: legal status for the young undocumented - but no citizenship - and a big emphasis on border security and interior law enforcement. The Virginia Republican and chairman of the committee which drafts legislation for the House can't get behind what he calls a "special" pathway to citizenship for the undocumented extended by the comprehensive immigration reform bill crafted by the Senate.
"The folks who want to have a path to citizenship have held everything else hostage," Goodlatte told his audience in Verona, Va., according to the Associated Press. "Now we want to say, 'Look we understand what you want but we think a legal status in the United States but not a special path to citizenship might be appropriate'". Instead of that, Goodlatte advocates for giving "Dreamers" - youth who were brought to the US illegally by their parents as children - a legal status which would not lead them to eventual citizenship. Dreamers would have to seek citizenship by family or employer sponsors. America's Voice, the nation's largest immigrant-advocate group, calls proposals without the "special" pathway tantamount to creating a "permanent underclass".
""In my opinion if you, after you have the borders secure and these enforcement mechanisms in place, if you were to do something [on extending benefits to undocumented immigrants], I would start first of all with children who were brought here illegally by their parents," he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday. "They've grown up here. They've been educated here. They are ready to face the world and they have no documents. I think there's a more compelling argument to be made for them." Together with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Goodlatte is drafting the Kids Act, a bill which will likely extend legal status to Dreamers.
In the past, the Virginia Republican has shown himself open to the possibility of a similar offer to a much larger part of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But he has opposed the Senate's comprehensive bill, which is unpopular among the majority of House Republicans. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) says he won't introduce it for consideration without the majority of his party's consent. The Senate's bill would extend legal status and a 13-year path to citizenship for some 8 million undocumented immigrants, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Goodlatte says the Republican majority in the House should focus on how to "reform immigration the right way to show how it should be done, even if it doesn't go all the way through to be signed by this president." According to the AP, he told one questioner, "I have a hard time, like you do, envisioning [Obama] signing some of these things. It doesn't mean we shouldn't at least show the American people that we are interested in solving this very serious problem that we have in our country."
The "right way" for Goodlatte and his Republican peers likely means a boost not just in border security - the Senate's bill put an additional $46 billion over 10 years toward that - but in interior law enforcement as well. One of the four immigration-related pieces of legislation the House has produced, the SAFE Act, would give local police the right to perform immigration-related enforcement operations such as the sweeps favored by Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. It would also make local forces eligible for federal grants to carry out those operations and make it a federal crime to be in the United States illegally.
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