WASHINGTON – After this week's massive demonstrations, many House Republicans are worried that a tough, anti-illegal-immigration bill they thought would please their political base has earned them little benefit while becoming a lightning rod for the fast-growing national movement for immigrant rights.
House Republicans rushed through legislation just before Christmas that would build hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, mandate that businesses verify the legality of all employees through a national database, fortify border patrols and declare illegal immigrants and those who help them to be felons. After more lenient legislation failed in the Senate last week, the House-passed version took on greater significance as hundreds of thousands of protesters nationwide turned out to denounce the bill.
Yesterday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., issued a joint statement seeking to deflect blame for the most harsh provisions of the House bill on the Democrats, who they said showed a lack of compassion. “It remains our intent to produce a strong border security bill that will not make unlawful presence in the United States a felony,” Hastert and Frist said.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., fired back that “there's no running away from the fact that the Republican House passed a bill and Senator Frist offered one that criminalizes immigrants.”
House Democrats acknowledged that they helped block Republican efforts on the floor last December to soften the Republican-crafted section declaring illegal immigrants to be felons, but they said responsibility rests with the Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly for its passage.
“The Democrats were not going to do anything to make it easier for Republicans to pass an atrocious bill,” said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco.
Yesterday's maneuvering underscores how the immigration issue has mushroomed into a fierce political debate with potentially large political stakes heading into the November congressional election. The hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets Monday vividly demonstrated the power of the issue, which some strategists say threatens to undercut President Bush's long-standing hope of making Hispanic voters a GOP constituency.
“There was political calculation that they could make this the wedge issue of 2006 and 2008, but it's not playing out that way,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. “This has galvanized and energized the Latino community like no other issue I have seen in two decades, and that's going to have electoral consequences.”
The politics of the issue have shifted markedly since the House acted. Republican lawmakers are increasingly saying they will now consider some avenue to grant illegal immigrants access to lawful employment. And Democrats who voted for the House bill with an eye on their political futures or to pre-empt feared attacks from conservatives are rethinking their position.
