Senate May Budge on Immigration

With the House and Senate stalemated over how to overhaul immigration law, the contours of one potential path to an agreement have begun to emerge.

The House has approved a bill that focuses on improving border security and cracking down on illegal hiring. Many of the conservative Republicans who are dominant in the House have said that these security measures must be firmly in place before the House begins discussions about elements of a Senate-passed bill that would create a guest worker program and offer steps to citizenship for most illegal immigrants now in the U.S.

Now some Republican senators are suggesting -- though gingerly -- that they would be willing to agree to some kind of timetable in which goals related to border security and law enforcement must be met before the guest worker and citizenship programs that the senators favor could begin.

“The idea that we’ll look at some sort of trigger before we implement everything else is worth some discussion,” said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who wrote part of the Senate plan that would offer legal status to many illegal immigrants.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an architect of the Senate legislation, said that the Senate bill, in practice, would put border security ahead of other new immigration measures.

“Interior enforcement and border enforcement will go first.... It’s going to take 18 months to two years to put the infrastructure in place to deal with guest workers,” McCain said. He added that the same was true of the proposed Senate program to create a path to citizenship for most of the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who would lead any negotiations with the House, was quoted even more directly by the Washington Times newspaper on the idea of putting in place border security and law enforcement measures before other elements of an immigration package.

“It may be down the line that we will come to some terms on a timetable, with border security first and employment verification first,” Specter was quoted as saying in the newspaper’s Tuesday editions. Specter, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Left unclear in the still-emerging conversation is whether senators would agree that specific border security and law enforcement goals or targets would have to be met before a guest worker or legalization program could begin.

It is also unclear whether the House would accept a step-by-step approach. Many House members say they oppose any citizenship program as an unwelcome “amnesty” for people who broke the law by crossing the border. Others say that guest worker programs undermine wages and job availability for native workers.

Still, some senators appealed Tuesday for House members to join them in negotiations to resolve the significant differences in the House and Senate visions of immigration policy. Those negotiations were expected to begin, but the House said last week that it wanted to hold a new round of hearings across the country on immigration before starting talks with the Senate.

“We are willing to negotiate with those who have specific disagreements with the Senate bill,” McCain said Tuesday.

The senators’ appeal to the House came as the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $31.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and its efforts to strengthen the borders in the fiscal year starting in October.

The funding is almost 5% more than last year’s levels, with border protection allocated $65 million more than President Bush had requested.

“We focused aggressively on border protection,” said committee chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.).