Washington – The collapse of a Senate deal on immigration has left millions of illegal workers in uncertainty, exposed a deep rift in the Republican Party and could cost President Bush a top legislative priority.
“An immigration system that forces people into the shadows of our society or leaves them prey to criminals is a system that needs to be changed,” Bush said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Friday.
But the president may need the power of prayer to get that change this year.
Republican Senate leaders are vowing to spend the two-week holiday recess that started this weekend trying again to assemble an immigration-reform proposal that can meet the approval of their colleagues.
But last week’s events showed how deeply the Republican Party is divided on the issue, with hard-liners pushing a House-passed law to criminalize illegal workers, and others like Bush wanting to give most illegal immigrants a path toward citizenship via a temporary-worker plan.
In showdown votes in the Senate on Friday, each of these approaches failed to win majority support, much less the 60 votes needed to cut off debate and move to final action.
Only a day after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., announced a “huge breakthrough” on immigration, the bipartisan compromise he heralded, which included a temporary-
worker plan, lost on a 38-60 procedural vote.
Then Frist’s version of the House’s get-tough bill, to criminalize illegal workers and fortify the U.S.-Mexican border, fared no better, failing 36-62.
Coming just hours after House leaders acknowledged that they could not muster the votes to pass a budget or a tax bill and went home for the recess, the Senate’s failure underscored a sense of Republican disarray.
The week saw the loss of one of the GOP’s top legislative wranglers, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who announced he would resign under an ethics cloud, and new and potentially politically harmful allegations that Bush approved the leak of classified information to stifle critics of his Iraq policy.
A new Associated Press poll gave Bush his lowest approval rating ever 36 percent and Democrats a 16-point advantage when voters were asked which party should control Congress.
“This could have been a historic week for America’s hard-working immigrants,” U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., said in the Democratic Party’s Spanish-language radio address Saturday. “Unfortunately, President Bush and his Republican senators were unable to overcome their internal divisions.”
As the Senate “breakthrough” collapsed, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Littleton Republican and a leader of the hard-line approach, said it’s possible there will be no immigration reform this year.
The compromise proposal would have established three tiers of illegal immigrants. Those who were here for more than five years would have to pay fines and meet other hurdles but would get a relatively smooth path toward permanent residency and then citizenship after several years.
Those who were here for less than five years, but more than two years, would have to travel to a designated U.S. port of entry and get a temporary work visa, with no guarantee of citizenship.
And those here for less than two years would be ordered home.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said Friday that he voted against the guest-worker bill because it “rewarded millions of individuals who have broken our laws.”
“We cannot reasonably expect to eliminate a problem like illegal immigration by rewarding it,” Allard said. “I do not believe it is fair to let lawbreakers jump to the front of the citizenship line.”
“I am appalled they are not listening to the citizens of this country,” said state Rep. David Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, of the senators who backed the compromise plan.
“Whenever you reward anybody for having broken the law in this country, no matter how you want to couch it, it’s amnesty,” Schultheis said.
But Salazar said in the radio address that Republicans were in the thrall of the “radical right wing of their party,” which supports “Draconian and inhuman proposals” like the House bill and “would criminalize undocumented immigrants and anyone who helps them.”
The Senate’s derailed compromise plan had disappointed even some pro-immigration-rights activists.
“We could do better,” said Danielle Short, human rights program director for the American Friends Service Committee. “There are some problematic pieces that don’t help people who contribute to our communities and who work hard. I don’t see why we would make the solution available to some people who are here without documents and not others.”
“It’s unfortunate the Senate went backward” from earlier legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee that would have put more immigrants on a citizenship track, said Polly Baca, a former state legislator and executive director of Colorado’s Latin American Research and Service Agency. “From my perspective, you have to treat that labor with dignity and justice,” she said.
Demonstrations in favor of liberalized immigration laws are scheduled this week in Washington and other cities. Rallies are planned Monday in Colorado Springs and Grand Junction.
The temporary-worker plan was supported by U.S. business interests that rely on immigrant labor, as well as by immigrant families.
Colorado’s ski resorts and lodging businesses rely heavily on seasonal foreign workers for staffing during peak months because Americans are reluctant to take such jobs, said Ilene Kam sler, president of the Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association.
“I’m not willing to fold my tent yet,” Kamsler said. “There is so much positioning going on and this has become such a political hot potato.”
But Tancredo said he and his supporters would use the holiday break as well, to keep grassroots pressure on the Senate.
“Hopefully, listening to their electorate will chasten these senators so that they’ll put amnesty away for good,” Tancredo said.
The failure of a guest-worker program wouldn’t bother Dan Owens, business representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 9 of Colorado.
“Most of my members aren’t in favor of a guest-worker program that allows those who entered the country illegally to stay,” he said.
“A lot of people think that the economy is going to go bust if we send all these people back. That is ludicrous.”
