Senate staffers told Yellowhammer Tuesday evening that the next couple of days will be key in the immigration debate behind-the-scenes as things start to move quickly in the U.S. Senate.
Senator Marco Rubio appeared on a record seven Sunday talk shows this week discussing the Gang of Eight‘s sweeping immigration reform proposal. The proposal was completed Tuesday and the New York Times immediately called it “the most ambitious effort in at least 26 years to repair, update and reshape the American immigration system.”
One of the most controversial portions of the bill is a 13-year path to citizenship for illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Democrats worked to make this provision, which many of us consider amnesty, more palatable to conservatives by vowing to boost Homeland Security spending by billions of dollars in order to strengthen immigration enforcement and to construct more fencing along the U.S./Mexico border.
Formal hearings on the bill are expected to begin Friday in the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is a member.
Sessions indicated earlier this week that he already sees cracks in the Gang of Eight’s enforcement promises. “When the Gang of Eight was first formed a publicly stated principle was the enforcement would come first — before legalization,” Sessions said Sunday. “Today…Gang of Eight members admitted that they abandoned this principle and that, in fact, that legalization — or amnesty — would come first.”
President Reagan in 1986 signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized close to 3 million illegal immigrants. But even his administration did not deliver on enforcement promises. As a result, we’re still dealing with this issue almost 30 years later. Are we seriously supposed to believe the Obama administration will succeed in enforcing the law where even Reagan didn’t?
Senator Sessions has repeatedly said that he believes this bill is bad for American workers. He noted earlier this week that one of his biggest concerns with this proposal is the “impact it will have on low-income Americans and those individuals and communities suffering from chronic underemployment…this bill, over ten years, will result in at least 30 million new foreign workers—more than the entire population of Texas.”
The Gang of Eight’s proposal will also expose taxpayers to trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security from which low-wage foreign workers will draw more benefits than they pay in. “These programs need strengthening, not further weakening,” Sessions said.
We’ll have more later this week as the debate continues.
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