Category: Immigration

One of the questions heading into today’s cloture vote on immigration was how Senator Norm Coleman would vote. Coleman had voted in favor of bringing the bill back to the floor, perplexing the bill’s opponents and putting Coleman squarely in the middle of the drama today.
Coleman voted against cloture today, joining seventeen other Senators in sending the bill back to the grave, this time apparenly for good. What changed? Coleman explains in his statement today that the process itself convinced him that the bill would never improve enough to support:

Today I voted against moving the immigration bill forward. It became increasingly clear that there were still too many problems with this bill and not enough time to correct them. Throughout this debate, the American people did not trust that the Congress or the President had the resolve to secure the border. In the end, their suspicions rang true, as we were unable vote on amendments to strengthen the border and workplace enforcement mechanisms, as well as ending the practice of so called “sanctuary cities”.
From the beginning, this bill was hastily put together; it skipped the committee process, and was rushed to a conclusion on the floor. In the end, we must find a way to bring the more than 12 million illegal immigrants out of the shadows. However, we must do so in a way that determines who is living inside our country, secures our borders, and restores the rule of law to our immigration policies and enforcement. I remain hopeful that we can successfully address this issue sometime in the future, because we must.

Congress lost the trust of the people and of a significant number of its own members through its failure to act, and its failure to properly develop the bill in such a way that Senators could fix its fatal flaws. Coleman had had enough, as had most everyone else.
Bush has announced that he will not return to this bill, instead focusing on the upcoming budget debates. Congress still needs to address border security and visa reform, however, and they had better do so soon. If Congress and the White House want some credibility in the future to pursue normalization, they have a chance now to start building it with real action and above-board legislation.

The immigration bill is dead, yet again, after the Senate rejected cloture by fourteen votes. In the end, the compromise could not even gain a majority in support of what conceptually may have been a passable compromise, but in reality was a poorly constructed, poorly processed mass of contradictions and gaps. Many of us who may have supported a comprehensive approach to immigration found ourselves amazed and repulsed by both the product and the process of this attempt to solve the immigration problem.
So what should happen now? The problems of immigration did not disappear with the failure of the cloture vote a few moments ago. Congress needs to act to resolve them — but they need to do so in a manner that respects the processes of representative democracy, and in a manner that builds the confidence of Americans rather than fuel their cynicism.
They need to address border security and visa-program problems immediately. Congress has left these problems simmering for over 21 years. Their failure to address the issue over two decades has demonstrated that Washington does not consider those issues a very high priority, and the Senate’s insistence on tying them to normalization underscores that. Poll after poll shows that Americans don’t believe Congress when it says it will do something — and so Congress needs to demonstrate their competence first before we take a flyer on creating another vast bureaucratic nightmare.
Secure the borders. Fix the visa program. Do those tasks by using the proper legislative processes in both chambers, allowing for real debate, honest and open amendment opportunities, and quit using clay pigeons and other parliamentary tricks to hide the bill and railroad it through Congress.
In other words, act responsibly, instead of trying to pull a fast one on the American public.
UPDATE: Some people argue that the failures of enforcement come from the executive branch, not the legislative. Certainly the executive branch shares the failure, but Congress has never allocated the resources for proper border enforcement, nor have they funded the visa overhaul. They have also created new bureaucracies (DHS) that actively impeded progress on these issues. The issue starts in Congress, and they need to act to provide the proper resources for these priorities.

I’ll be watching and reporting on the cloture process this morning, and the opponents of the immigration bill seem to be off to a good start. John Ensign, the chair of the NRSC, has announced that he will vote against cloture to kill the bill. That puts them at six conversions from Tuesday, either announced or heavily leaning, which should be enough to reject cloture.
9:27 CT – Lots of bloviating at the moment. Dick Durbin is talking about a “nation of immigrants” and “how many more can we take?” Well, that’s true as far as it goes, but that’s not the issue at hand today. What we’re talking about (everyone but Tom Tancredo) is illegal immigration, not legal immigration. Almost no one has a problem with legal immigration, but we want the borders secured. It’s not about diversity, it’s about security and confidence in the system’s ability to control immigration rationally.
9:31 – Well, no one bloviates like Ted Kennedy. It’s more of what Durbin said, but just louder. However, I had to laugh when Kennedy said, “Year after year, we’ve had the broken borders.” Yes! Exactly! Let’s fix that before we start worrying about normalization! “This bill is strong; it’s fair and practical.” It’s also about 20 hours old, and most of us haven’t had the opportunity to review it properly — including most of Kennedy’s colleagues.
9:38 – It looks like the cloture vote itself will come at 9:50 am CT, or about 12 minutes from now …
9:41 – Arlen Specter believes that people who call and e-mail Senators do not represent America. Not coincidentally, only 14% of American people think Congress represents America.
9:44 – “We have a foolproof method of determining whether an employee is illegal.” We do? When did that arrive, and why hasn’t it been implemented yet?
9:48 – Chutzpah alert! Specter is complaining about “cynicism” and machinations on the Baucus amendment on a bill where leadership has maneuvered to kill real debate and amendment. You have to be kidding me. For cynicism, nothing tops a clay pigeon.
9:53 – Harry Reid, victim of hatred and obloquy. He complained that he got a hate letter from his hometown over the immigration bill, and that talk radio has had a “field day” with its “simplicity”. Reid also evokes the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body at the end of a process in which he blocked true deliberation.
10:04 – Cloture vote begins. Does Reid have a couple of Democrats ready to switch from Nay to Yea? He’ll need them.
10:11 – Webb votes against cloture, and I count 22 so far overall against, with 20 for.
10:15 – Landrieu votes no, another Democrat against, although that’s not a switch. Rockefeller stayed as a no, as well.
10:19 – Bernie Sanders and Tom Harkin voted against cloture, as did Nelson of Nebraska. Robert Byrd stayed a No, while Olympia Snowe stayed an Aye. Mark Pryor voted against cloture. Sam Brownback switched to No — very interesting.
10:20 – Norm Coleman voted against cloture. Wow.
10:26 – A majority, 53 Senators, have rejected cloture. It’s dead … again.
Continuing ..

The immigration debate has brought a number of Republican Senators to the forefront, especially Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint, and James Inhofe. The man who some might have expected on the front lines, however, has taken an ever-lower profile during the fracas Mitch McConnell, the highly effective Minority Leader, has unexpectedly transformed into a wallflower:

With his caucus bitterly divided and the Senate descending into procedural warfare, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stayed away from the Senate floor as the most sweeping overhaul of immigration laws in 21 years hung in the balance.
Facing the biggest challenge of his leadership tenure, McConnell has largely chosen to work behind the scenes and instead allow a bloc of conservatives to spar with Republican supporters of the bill. …
Since the bipartisan negotiators and the White House reached a deal on the bill last month, opposition on the right has been growing. That has put Republicans who are up for reelection, including McConnell, in an uncomfortable position as the White House has launched an all-out push to give President Bush a major victory in his final months in office.
McConnell’s absence from the fight highlighted his lukewarm feeling on the bill. He is neither an advocate nor a staunch critic of the bill, and has not said how he would vote on the underlying bill. The senator voted against efforts to shut down debate earlier this month, but voted Tuesday on a motion to proceed to debating the bill. Last year he voted for the measure that passed the Senate but failed to clear Congress.
Publicly, McConnell has tried to limit talking about the issue. Reporters who pepper him with questions about immigration legislation often are greeted with silence. And recently he cut short a news conference on energy issues once questions turned to the immigration bill.

The newfound stoicism has its merits, on at least two bases. McConnell has to run for re-election in conservative Kentucky next year, and as the song says, it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. He wants to leave his options open, and he’s doing a good job of it by confounding anyone who wants to know where he actually stands on the bill.
On the political side, it’s almost certainly genius. He has worked with the White House, as his job requires, to assist them in getting their policy onto the Senate floor. That’s as fas as he’s going to go publicly for either George Bush or Harry Reid. The Majority Leader complained about getting the blame for the arrogant and unprecedented process being used for the immigration bill, telling people that McConnell agreed to it beforehand. That may be true, but it isn’t McConnell on the Senate floor trying to defend forcing a vote on a bill that hadn’t even been correctly published yet. McConnell has hung the process firmly around Reid’s neck.
Unfortunately for McConnell, he’s going to have to choose sides today. While one more procedural hurdle could trip the bill after this cloture vote, today’s opportunity holds the most promise for actually killing the bill. The Quiet Man will have to speak up and be counted.

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, the saying goes. In the case of the immigration bill, it appears that an parents are dropping like flies, and the Democrats have begun a paternity claim naming George Bush as its father. If he can’t deliver 20 votes for cloture this morning, they say the bill’s failure will rest on his shoulders:

Just two days ago, 64 senators voted to revive the bill, with many saying they wanted to give the Senate a chance to improve the bill through amendments. But after a messy day in the chamber yesterday, with dozens of objections, arguments on the floor and five amendments defeated, at least a half-dozen senators said publicly or privately that their patience has run out.
“The way this has been handled, I’m not going to take a leap of faith,” said Sen. Richard M. Burr, North Carolina Republican, who voted to advance the bill on Tuesday but said the way Democratic leaders ran the floor yesterday left no room to “take a bad bill and make it better.” …
Democratic leaders have said they can deliver about 40 votes for the bill and called on President Bush and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to deliver at least 20 votes. Democrats said if the bill fails, Mr. Bush will get the blame.

That sounds like wishful thinking. Certainly the sense one gets from those Senators looking to divorce themselves from the bill now isn’t that they’re abandoning it because of a lack of White House pressure. The process has disgusted several of them, and the blame for that goes to Harry Reid, not George Bush.
Let’s recap, shall we? The bill came to the Senate originally through a self-appointed committee of Senators, bypassing the normal committee process where Senators can debate and amend proposals in a sane and rational manner. The “Masters of the Universe” wanted only four days of debate, but under pressure, Reid gave it eight — but refused to allow more than a handful of amendments. The bill lost on cloture by 15 votes, a clear rejection of the arrogance of Reid’s process.
So what did he do this time? He decided on an even more arrogant process, demanding that the Senate vote on a bill that had not even been provided to them. Reid used an unprecedented procedure, the “clay pigeon”, and then set up the rules so that no one could offer any further amendments. He turned the world’s greatest deliberative body into the In-N-Out Debate Society, a railroad job so complete that the only rational option to punish him for it is to shoot down cloture and embarass him publicly for it.
It looks like more Senators have come to the same conclusion. He needs 20 GOP Senators to join 40 Democrats to endorse his historically bad leadership, and I’m not sure he’ll get either number. If anyone fathered this dead duck, it’s the man who spawned the clay pigeon.

It looks like the Senate will attempt to pass cloture on the comprehensive and incomprehensible immigration reform package tomorrow morning. Thanks to an unexpected failure to kill an amendment, the cloture vote will most likely come in the morning, perhaps as early as 10:30 am ET:

The Senate’s revived legislation to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants faces a critical test Thursday after surviving potentially fatal challenges.
Attempts from the right and left to alter key elements of the delicate bipartisan compromise failed Wednesday, including a Republican proposal to deny illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and Democratic bids to reunite legal immigrants with family members.
The Senate killed, by a 56-41 vote, an amendment by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to provide more green cards for parents of U.S. citizens. By a 55-40 margin, it tabled a proposal by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., to give family members of citizens and legal permanent residents more credit toward green cards in a new merit-based points system.
A make-or-break procedural vote was set for Thursday, however, as the Senate plowed through amendments that supporters hoped would address waverers’ concerns.

Jeff Sessions has taken to calling Harry Reid and the backers of the compromise “Masters of the Universe” for their high-handed tactics in shoving this bill through the Senate in an unprecedented fashion. Members didn’t even get the bill until around 2 pm ET today; John Cornyn literally had it handed to him as he complained on the floor about its absence. Now they have to decide whether they want to close off debate on a 400-page bill that they’ve had for less than 24 hours to review.
Ironically, their efficiency in keeping amendments off of the bill may wind up killing its chances. A number of Senators voted for the initial cloture necessary to bring this bill off the table on Tuesday with the thought that they could amend the bill significantly enough to make it palatable. However, the moderates saw their amendments fall by the wayside — Kay Bailey Hutchison, Norm Coleman, Jim Webb, Kit Bond, and others. Only five votes for the previous cloture need to change to No for this cloture in order to tube the bill again, and as National Review has documented, it looks close now.
Bloomberg reports that the bill is in real peril:

The fate of U.S. immigration legislation was cast into doubt when at least six senators who helped revive the proposed overhaul said they either oppose or are leaning against a move to permit a vote on final passage. …
Republicans Richard Burr of North Carolina and Christopher Bond of Missouri and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska said they oppose permitting a vote on final passage. Virginia Democrat Jim Webb and Republicans John Ensign of Nevada and Pete Domenici of New Mexico said they were leaning that way.

I’ll be covering the cloture motion live tomorrow morning, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Michelle Malkin will be all over it. In the meantime, you can sign Senator Inhofe’s Secure Borders Now petition at this site, if you want to send a message to the waverers. And if you want to see Senator Inhofe’s argument for yourself — well, here it is:

Stay tuned. My prediction? Cloture fails, 57-42.

I’m watching C-SPAN 2 at the moment, a fascinating exercise in official boredom. Today, however, the lunacy outweighs the ennui. As Michelle Malkin notes, the clay pigeon had to fly back to its coop this afternoon after a rushed reading by Senate staffers found a plethora of mistakes and at least one serious omission. That leaves the Senate debating a bill that no one has read, and that no one has put in its final form, which means that everyone on the floor has blathered about nothing at all. It’s almost as ironic as Seinfeld — and we’re paying for it.
Brian Darling appeared on CQ Radio yesterday to talk about the outrageous back-room maneuvering this bill has taken already. Today he e-mails Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner to revise and extend those remarks:

Someone once said not to watch how sausage or legislation are made. Today especially I prefer to be at the sausage factory.
As if the Senate floor situation could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff is now rewriting the Clay Pigeon amendment behind closed doors. It is the intent of the Majority Leader to bring this new unread Amendment up without the Republicans seeing the language. Yesterday Senator Reid did not have his massive 373 page amendment ready when he started debate on it and mistakes were made in the initial drafting. This fact was not discovered until Republicans objected to waiving the reading of the bill, and the Senate Clerk had nothing to read. Shockingly, Reid scrambled around, put the floor in morning business for a few hours, and then allowed Kennedy’s staff make final changes to the amendment. The language was finally made available around 5:30 pm and Reid “graciously” gave Republicans the night to go through it before moving to it this morning.
This morning Republicans announced that Reid’s amendment did not include the Sessions EITC provision in the touchback section, despite the fact that all previously passed amendments were supposed to be incorporated in the bill and the Clay Pigeon amendment. This oversight is the only mistake so far found, yet there may be other mistakes and intentional omissions in the 373 page amendment. This morning Reid put the floor back in morning business and sent his staff off to rewrite the mega amendment once again. Today, “the most deliberative body in the world,” is left to debate legislation that they do not have a copy of…

Thus far, the finest deliberative body has voted on two amendments, one from Kay Bailey Hutchison and the other from James Webb. The former has been tabled, which in the US means it’s dead, and the latter appears well on its way there. Hutchison voted against cloture yesterday, but Webb voted to bring the bill to the floor.
Webb lost on his amendment, 79-18. Will that move him to a Nay on the next cloture vote?

Michelle Malkin has the “clay pigeon” legislation in PDF format on her site right now. I’ve just downloaded it and started reviewing the document. I’ll spend the evening perusing it after dinner, and I’ll update the post as I find items of interest.
One point I find interesting — it’s a searchable PDF. That will make it easier to find key points to see what changes have been made. I’d encourage CQ readers to read through the document and list your concerns, along with page and line references, in the comments. Let’s see whether we can outdo Congress in reading legislation.
POINT 1: Page 21, lines 12-16, apparently reinstated the 24-hour limit on probationary background checks. Remember when they promised to fix that so that no one would get a probationary card without passing the full background check? I guess they broke that promise.
POINT 2: Page 29, lines 12-end: The Z-visa has unlimited 4-year terms. I don’t think this is a change, but shouldn’t the immigrant at some point actually immigrate?
POINT 3: Page 33, lines 19-25: Z-visa non-immigrants over the age of 65 are not expected to maintain employment in order to remain eligible to be in the US. Again, why would they be here if they’re not working and not applying for a regular immigration status?
POINT 4: Page 48, lines 8-14: Interesting method here to ensure that Z-visa non-immigrants don’t get preferential treatment. The regulations set up a timing mechanism so that no Z-visa immigrants can file for permanent residency until 30 days after eligibility for those who applied for normal immigration on May 1, 2005. That means that illegals can’t “cut in line” ahead of anyone who applied on that date or before, but can be put ahead of legal immigrants who applied in the last two years.
POINT 5: Page 61, entire page: The language has changed in this section to allow access for all law-enforcement activity to the data gleaned from applications. Before, it was restricted to just immigration enforcement and national-security activities.
POINT 6: Page 67, lines 7-11: 80% of all penalties paid by the applicants will come through installment plans. I understand the need for this, but it puts the federal government on the hook for managing a payment system for 12 million new people, along with all of the other mandates in this bill.
POINT 7: Page 69, line 20: The DREAM Act, providing scholarships for the children of illegal immigrants, still exists in the bill.
POINT 8: Page 89-90, lines 22-04: The 24-hour limit on background checks still holds within the Ag Workers section (the temporary guest worker program). If it takes longer than 24 hours, they get their credentials. (h/t: commenter Redherkey)
POINT 9: Page 92, lines 14-15: Do I read this correctly? The new limit on guest-worker visas is now 1,500,000 — not counting dependent Z-A visas? Wasn’t this originally 400,000 and reduced by half later?
POINT 10: Pages 169-170: The employer fines seem rather daunting. The first tier fine for employing an illegal will be $5,000 per occurence. If an employer has been fined in the past for employing an illegal alien, it escalates to $10,000, and on up to $75,000 per occurence. If the ICE decides to enforce the law on employers — still a rather open point — it could get very expensive. I wonder if that applies to corporations as a whole, or each location separately.
POINT 11: Pages 227-8: The temporary worker program gets fleshed out more specifically here, and it appears to have a limit of 180,000 for “Y-visa nonimmigrants.” If so, what are the Z-A visas, and why do they have a cap of 1,500,000?
POINT 12: Page 276: This is an amendment that forces any probationary status to wait until after the security triggers have been met. It seems to me that this is another example of the many cross purposes of this bill, and it will serve to confuse both backers and opponents of this bill.
I’m done for the evening. If you want to take a look through the bill, check with NZ Bear, who has a searchable HTML version up at his site.

11:29 am CT: So far, it looks like cloture will pass on the motion to retrieve the immigration compromise bill back to the floor, in the “clay pigeon” maneuver. Both parties have votes for and against cloture, and in that sense it’s the most bipartisan effort we’ve seen in the 110th Congress. Notable GOP voting for cloture include John Warner and Norm Coleman; notable Democrats against include Max Baucus and Robert Byrd. It’s going to be close.
11:35 – John Ensign voted for cloture. Interesting, and somewhat disappointing. It passed 64-35, with only the ill Tim Johnson not voting. Sam Brownback also voted for cloture. I’ll have more on the yeas and nays when the roll call vote gets posted.
This is the first of two key cloture votes. It’s possible that some of the yeas may turn to nays when the final list of amendments gets promulgated — but I’d call that a long shot.
11:41 – Did Bush call this bill amnesty? ABC News says so, but this seems like a rhetorical misstep rather than an admission:

“You know, I’ve heard all the rhetoric — you’ve heard it, too — about how this is amnesty. Amnesty means that you’ve got to pay a price for having been here illegally, and this bill does that.”

Tony Snow has this correction, which pounds on the official White House line:

“This has been construed as an assertion that comprehensive immigration reform legislation before the Senate offers amnesty to immigrants who came here illegally. That is the exact opposite of the president’s long-held and often-stated position.
“President Bush has noted repeatedly that the comprehensive reform he supports is not an amnesty bill. Amnesty means forgiving wrongdoing without imposing punishment. The immigration reforms passed in 1986 granted amnesty. The legislation under consideration this year does not. This measure imposes significant punishments on those who came to this country illegally between 1986 and the beginning of this year. In fact, the White House website addresses the myth that the measure is amnesty.”

Actually, the 1986 measure (Simpson-Mazzoli) imposed a $1,000 fine for amnesty applicants. This bill requires the same for the temporary Z-visa application and scalable fines to $5,000 for those who seek citizenship, but it’s actually more similar than different regarding fines.

Congress appears to have a hearing problem. Oh, they have heard the uproar over the immigration reform bill, but they still seem to be deaf to the actual complaints that have fueled the opposition to it. As a result, the backers of the bill will add an amendment today that not only fails to address the chief criticisms of the bill, but actually degrade one of its benefits:

With a crucial test vote scheduled for today, Republican supporters of a sweeping immigration bill threw their weight yesterday behind a significant change to the legislation that would force illegal immigrants to return to their home countries to apply for legal status. …
Perhaps the most significant shift came from three of the bill’s Republican architects: Sens. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Mel Martinez (Fla.). Under the current legislation, virtually all of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants would be granted provisional legal status immediately, provided that within 18 months they pay a fine, cover processing fees and submit to a criminal background check to get a new five-year “Z Visa.” If they wanted legal permanent residence, heads of illegal-immigrant households would have to return to their home countries to apply for a green card.
Kyl, Graham and Martinez had already put together an amendment to secure $4.4 billion for border enforcement, create a tracking system to keep tabs on guest workers and permanently bar workers who overstay their visas from returning. Those measures would augment provisions already in the bill to tighten border security and clamp down on employers of illegal immigrants.
Yesterday, the three senators added a provision that would force illegal immigrants to return to their home countries to apply for Z Visas, not just their green cards. With the architects of the bill behind it, supporters predicted that the amendment would pass easily.

In other words, they want to expand the “touchback” provision to come at the beginning of the process. In order to “step out of the shadows,” as the bill’s backers like to put it, illegal immigrants will have to go back to their country of origin first and apply for the probationary Z-visa. If the bill follows its previous pattern, that will only apply to the heads of households, forcing 4-6 million people to leave the country within a short period of time after the bill’s passage — no mean feat itself.
That sounds like it solves the issue of those who want people deported for their illegal entry, but it doesn’t. In the first place, it removes the incentive for self-reporting, the only real benefit of the Z-visa program offers. A significant percentage will just remain in the shadows, and the national-security aspect of the Z-visas will never get realized. Also, it doesn’t do much to force the illegals to the “back of the line” on immigration approval, which is the greater issue for many who oppose the normalization process offered in this compromise. It just puts the touchback in a spot where every head of household has to do it, regardless of whether they want permanent residency here or not.
The Senate still hasn’t heard the message about the lack of trust the people have in them to secure the border and fix the broken visa system before creating the bureaucratic mess that their normalization proposal will require. The people want to see Congress and the White House successfully start clamping down on the border. The so-called virtual fence has missed its deadline already — for just 28 miles of it:

Known as Project 28, for the 28 miles of border that the towers will scan, the so-called virtual fence forms the backbone of the Secure Border Initiative, known as SBInet, a multibillion-dollar mix of technology, manpower and fencing intended to control illegal border crossings.
If successful, hundreds of such towers could dot the 6,000 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders.
But glitches with the radar and cameras have forced the project to miss its June 13 starting date, just as Congress focuses anew on border security in the Senate measure to overhaul immigration law.
Officials at the Homeland Security Department insist that Boeing, which has a $67 million contract to develop the project and others, will soon put it back on track, though they are not providing a new completion date.

This comes 21 years after the last time Congress promised to secure the border. People haven’t forgotten that promise, and the failures of both parties to honor it. We don’t want to buy normalization a second time as part of the promise that should have been honored by eleven subsequent Congresses and four different Presidents.
Secure the border. Fix the visa program, and the passport system as well. When those tasks have been completed, then we can talk about how best to normalize those remaining in the US and how best to incentivize them to come forward. Once the main problem has been resolved, Washington will have built up enough credibility to gain our trust on flexible solutions.