Strife over immigration bill

The Senate launched debate Monday on a sweeping bipartisan bill that could yield the most significant changes in the nation’s immigration law in 20 years.

But even before lawmakers voted 69 to 23 to begin the debate, the bill’s opponents promised a bruising fight, taking to the Senate floor to protest the way the measure was written, the way it will be debated and what it would do.

With debate set to formally begin today, Republicans and Democrats are gearing up for a fight to reshape the bill.

Republicans have said they want to scrap entirely the bill’s provision that would allow illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, a critical objective for Democrats. And Democrats have set their sights on the Republican-sponsored overhaul to the immigration system that would reduce the emphasis on reuniting families and create a merit-based system meant to serve the economy.

In the middle of this looming storm, the small bipartisan coalition that crafted the legislation plans to meet daily to identify threats to the bill and decide when they should band together to vote in its defense. The political trade-off of the merit-based system and the legalization program for illegal immigrants lies at the core of the coalition’s “grand bargain” on immigration.

Amid Republican complaints that the bill’s language had not been finalized, its bipartisan authors warned that an aggressive attack might destroy their brittle unity, endangering the bill’s chances of survival.

“We have a fragile coalition,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a leading member of the group. “If there are any changes on the fundamentals of the grand bargain, we’re going to run the risk of losing senators. The issues are enormous. No domestic issue is of greater importance than this one, because today on immigration, we have anarchy.”

Immediately after the procedural vote to start debate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he would allocate two weeks for debate. Republicans had pushed hard for more time after Reid had initially suggested that the Senate should finish by Memorial Day.

Reid started the day by acknowledging that the bill is flawed. “Nearly everyone agrees that the existing bill is imperfect,” he said. “What we have now is a starting point.” He added that “there are no winners under the current system, only losers.”

For both sides, the bill presents complicated and politically risky issues, and has already caused lawmakers to leave the coalition that drew it up. The group of about 12 senators, roughly half from each party, formed the core group that met over three months with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez to draft the bill.

Democratic members include the lead negotiator, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.). Republicans include Specter, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-N.C.) and their lead negotiator, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Specter said members would vote their conscience on different amendments, unless they posed a risk to the bill’s core “grand bargain.”

Democrats drafting the bill had to agree to a temporary worker program that does not allow participants to remain permanently in the United States, a source of deep concern to immigrant advocates and some unions that traditionally support Democrats. The same Democratic allies also challenged the agreement with Republicans to reduce the emphasis on family “reunification” for future immigration.

Frustration with those compromises led Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to break from the coalition, though he did vote to start debate. He described “three serious flaws” with the bill, including its “anti-family bias, a temporary worker program that creates a permanent underclass and exorbitant fines.” Illegal immigrants making the transition to citizenship would have to pay $5,000 in fines. Noting that the amount outstrips those for the possession of firearms or narcotics, Menendez dismissed the bill as unfair and impractical.

Republicans, who have been sharply divided over the issue of “amnesty,” are struggling over the “Z visa,” which would allow the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to live legally in the U.S. for eight years and work toward citizenship.

Some are also unhappy with provisions that ban law enforcement from using information in the visa applications. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a long-standing member of the coalition, peeled away from the group in part over this issue of confidentiality, saying a similar provision marred the 1986 immigration reform that is derided as an amnesty. After that law legalized about 2.7 million illegal immigrants, enforcement measures were not put in place and millions more are believed to have illegally crossed the border looking for citizenship.

“We need to fix that through an amendment and I’ll be offering one,” Cornyn said on CNN.

Several other Republican lawmakers went to the Senate floor to lodge complaints. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who led opposition to the bill Monday, objected to the closed-door nature of the coalition’s work. “Who was in this room where you all met?” he challenged the coalition. “Who’s going to decide what’s in that bill? The whole Senate or not?”

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) protested how little time senators had to prepare. “The first time this legislation was available to me was 2 a.m. on Saturday,” he said, saying it could be 1,000 pages long in its final form.

“Why are we in a rush to pass this bill? If the American people fully understood what was buried in this bill they would be outraged,” he said.

Specter suggested that many of the floor speeches were theater, but he was cautious about predicting success for his coalition. “The grand bargainers will stick together,” he said, “but there are not 51 of us.”

nicole.gaouette@latimes.com