In the immediate aftermath of the election, politicians from both parties stressed the need for a comprehensive immigration reform bill to be passed through Congress and signed by the president. Since November, feverish work on Capitol Hill has produced many proposals, both from bipartisan groups of legislators in the Senate and the House, as well as from the president. Further details have now become available regarding the first actual bill arising from this work, negotiated by a key group of four Republican and four Democratic senators. The bill, to be introduced this week, will be known as the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. Once the bill is released, the full Senate Judiciary Committee will get its first detailed look at the compromises agreed to among the eight lead negotiators, and will conduct hearings and markups of the bill.
While the bill is massive, it is helpful to remember that this legislation was negotiated within a relatively unusual bipartisan consensus about the contours of any comprehensive immigration reform that was likely to be able to pass both the Senate and the House. Since the Senate’s last immigration reform attempts in 2006 and 2007, the consensus has been that any bill must deal with improving all parts of our immigration system: continued efforts to enhance border security and interior enforcement of immigration laws; enhancing employer enforcement to make obtaining work more difficult for persons without lawful status; reforming the legal immigration system to provide viable alternatives for those who would come for work, and employers unable to find available U.S. workers; and providing a path to permanent residence for those present without status.
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