Democratic Rep. Joe Garcia of Florida announced on Twitter on Tuesday that one of his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), had signed on to a comprehensive immigration reform bill co-sponsored by a host of Host Democrats, joining Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) to become the second House Republican to add their name to the legislation. Shortly after Garcia made the announcement on Twitter, Ros-Lehtinen released a statement saying, "It's important to keep the conversation going in trying to fix the broken immigration system. I favor any approach that will help us move the negotiations forward. Other Members may soon produce a bipartisan product that may also deserve support and I'm cautiously optimistic that we can pass meaningful immigration reform."
The move comes as the chances of a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration system have begun looking less and less likely. On Friday, Senator Marco Rubio said lawmakers should embrace House Republicans' "piecemeal" approach on the issue. Rubio, a Florida Republican, had helped co-author the Senate's comprehensive bill, which House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has refused to introduce for consideration, pointing to the objections of most of the GOP majority in the lower chamber. "We have to address that issue in a realistic way," the senator told CNN.
In mid-September, President Barack Obama also indicated that House Republicans' preferred approach - small bills which deal with one piece of immigration reform at a time - would be acceptable to him as long as it included a path to citizenship for many of the 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. "I'm happy to let the House work its will as long as the bill that ends up on my desk speaks to the central issues that have to be resolved," he told Telemundo then.
The present comprehensive bill is largely the same as the bipartisan overhaul which passed the Seante 68 to 32 in late June before stalling amid Boehner's refusal to introduce it. But it strips out the "border surge" amendment, which committed an extra $46 billion to border enforcement measures - a sum which even co-sponsor Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) called "overkill" - in a last-minute effort by Democrats to rally additional Republican votes in the Senate. In its place would be the Border Security Results Act, originally written in April, which would set detection and surveillance goals along the US-Mexico border and require Homeland Security to plan and implement them - a stipulation considerably simpler than the "border surge" amendment's allotment of drones, 20,000 extra Border Patrol agents, and surveillance technology.
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