Inside D.C.

On immigration reform, don’t reinvent the wheel

It wasn’t a very good week for immigration reform efforts, particularly in the Senate.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), good to his word, dedicated nearly the entire week to an open debate on any and all immigration bills.  Four bills were brought to the floor, including a bipartisan effort and a GOP version by Sen. Charles Grassley (R, IA) mirroring President Trump’s priorities; four bills failed.

The oddest part of this caravan of doomed legislation is that none of the proffered bills appeared to be built upon the successful comprehensive immigration reform bill – S. 744, the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act”— overwhelmingly approved by the Senate back in June, 2013.

The Senate bill was as bipartisan as a piece of legislation can get, and it evolved through as pure a legislative process as I’ve seen.

S. 744 was cobbled together by the so-called “Gang of Eight,” a bipartisan bunch of senior senators who followed a rare, but very smart strategy.  For each major subject area in need of reform, the lawmakers identified the industry or group of stakeholders most directly invested in specific new policy. Those special interests – both employers and workers – sat in large and small rooms, talked, debated and argued until they came up with an acceptable compromise section of the prospective legislation.  The grower/production/processing goals of agriculture and food production were pursued by the Agriculture Workforce Coalition, chaired by the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC).

The first version of the bill was sent to the Judiciary Committee, where then-Chair Patrick Leahy (D, VT) held weeks of hearings, and days of committee mark-up on the legislation.  During the committee process, 301 amendments were offered on the bill; 92 were accepted, and the legislation was approved for the floor on a bipartisan 13-5 vote.

When the second version of the bill reached the Senate floor under regular order, more than 500 amendments were filed on issues both germane to and totally unrelated to immigration reform.  While many amendments were talked about – “offered and withdrawn” – only a  few deemed critical to improving the package were accepted.  The bill survived days of floor debate and ultimately was approved 68-32.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the DREAM Act to provide legal protection for 1.8 million eligible workers in the U.S. brought here illegally as minor children were not big issues in 2013 because of actions, wise or not, by President Obama.  All the noise was about border security, visas, STEM workers and mandatory E-Verify.

However, today there’s been some pretty public bipartisan group hugs on DACA and the DREAM Act, so “fixes” could easily be negotiated. Heck, the president agreed to a path to citizenship and the need to protect not only registered, but DACA-eligible workers.  Those fixes could be inserted into a new and improved version of S. 744.   By “new and improved” I mean a bipartisan reinvention of that comprehensive bill, updating and dumping out the unnecessary, adding the necessary, and moving forward.

The House refused to take up the Senate product back in 2013 out of a need to put its “stamp” on several bills instead of a single efficient, negotiated bipartisan package.  Had wiser heads prevailed back then, we would have been spared the immigration angst and harangue of the last five years.