Senate rejects move to tie immigration overhaul to border security

WASHINGTON — In the first and only vote Thursday on the immigration bill, senators turned back a Republican measure that would have delayed a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally until after the border with Mexico is fully secure.

Republicans still plan to offer several other measures to enhance border security, but this one, from Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, was one of the most hard-line of the proposals.

The 57-43 vote to defeat the amendment offered an imprecise test of whether the Senate will find the 60 votes needed to pass the bill. Some senators who favored the tough approach may still vote for the bill.

Party leaders outside Congress continued pushing GOP lawmakers to soften their opposition to the overhaul, which needs Republican votes to pass. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida worked behind the scenes to come up with a compromise on border security.

“That’s one of the problems in the bill right now — one of the things I’m going to help fix,” Rubio said on talk radio’s “The Andrea Tantaros Show.”

Rubio was one of four Republicans and four Democrats who drafted the bill. All four of those Republicans voted to table Grassley’s amendment, as did Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Two conservative Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, joined all the other Republicans to back the tougher approach to border security.

Amid continued discord between the parties, senators halted work on the bill until next week, when they will resume efforts to reach agreement for votes on some of the nearly 100 proposed amendments.

Top Republicans, including Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, sought to nudge GOP lawmakers toward an overhaul of immigration laws that party leaders see as being crucial to winning back Latino voters who have largely turned toward the Democratic Party.

Bush met with a small group of House Republicans for a private breakfast and spoke later at a forum. He talked about his Mexican-born wife and his “little munchkin” granddaughter, whose Canadian-born mother is of Iraqi descent. He said their experiences brought a “tremendous amount of vitality” to his life and noted that his granddaughter, Georgia, could grow up be president.

“Why can’t that be what the debate is about?” he said at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “You change the conversation from the question of illegal immigration and you move it to, ‘How do you create an economic strategy of sustained economic growth?’ And the whole dynamic changes.”

In a meeting at the White House, top Democratic senators discussed other changes that could be made to draw more Republican backing for the bill, which has the support of President Obama.

Senators engaged in a rocky exchange that underscored the partisan divide on Capitol Hill over the best way to secure the border before the 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally can gain legal status.

One of the next amendments that will come up, from Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Republican, would prevent immigrants from starting on the path to citizenship until 350 miles of a long-promised 700-mile double-layer fence is built. They could not gain permanent legal status until the rest of the fence is completed. Only 36 miles of fencing stands today, he said.

“One of the best, simplest, plainest, most straightforward ways of doing that is to build the fence,” said Thune, estimating the cost at $3.2 million a mile. “It makes perfect sense to the American people.”

But Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), who has sway over money for fencing as chairwoman of the Appropriation Committee’s subcommittee on homeland security, said her visits to the border showed that immigrants can still find ways to get through. A smarter approach that uses technology, she said, is needed to stop “ingenious” immigrants.

“I’m not going to waste taxpayer money on a dumb fence,” Landrieu said.

Thune acknowledged that no barrier would be “100% effective,” but said his fence would “be a significant deterrent.”

Landrieu, a conservative Democrat, was unimpressed. “I voted for the dumb fence once,” she said. “I’m not going to do it again.”

Under the legislation, immigrants can gain provisional legal status six months after the Department of Homeland Security develops a plan to stop 90% of the illegal crossings from Mexico. After 10 years, if the plan is “operational” and if immigrants have paid fines and fees and remain in good standing, they can reach permanent legal status with green cards. In 13 years, they can become citizens.

These border provisions, however, have drawn criticism from Republicans because they do not require the department to actually achieve the goal of securing the border. Grassley’s proposal would have prevented immigrants from making the initial transition to provisional status until the border was fully secure, a goal that experts say would leave immigrants in a gray zone.

To gain more support from Republicans, Rubio wants to give Congress, not the Department of Homeland Security, a larger role in devising that border plan.

“We need to detail the border plan in the bill so we don’t leave it to chance,” Rubio said on the radio show, “so that if this bill passes, senators won’t just be voting for immigration reform, they will be voting and approving a border plan they know will work.”

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com