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Fans, Foes of Immigration Reform Agree on One Point: Bill is Imperfect
June 16, 2007

By Abdi Aynte , Minnesota Monitor

As President Bush tries to breathe life back into the immigration reform bill that stalled in the Senate last week, the debate over the risks and rewards of creating a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants is alive and kicking.

Both sides of the immigration issue agree that the legislation, described as a comprehensive reform measure, is imperfect. But supporters say its benefits outweigh its deficiencies, while opponents, who are mostly conservatives, assail it as amnesty.

Notably unusual about this bill is that it sprang from a fragile agreement between a bipartisan group of senators and the White House. President Bush, whose approval ratings have plummeted because of the war in Iraq, sees the measure as a chance to repair his image.

But the impact of the proposed bill on immigrants, legal or not, is profound. And that's unnerving to the millions who could lose the ability to bring their families here in favor of skill-based immigration. Among them are 400,000 legal immigrants in Minnesota and an estimated 85,000 undocumented.
Bill will be back
A week after the immigration reform bill hit partisan snags over dozens of proposed changes, Senate leaders announced Thursday that they have agreed to bring the controversial bill back to the floor in three weeks.
Under the agreement, the Senate will consider 22 amendments from Democrats and 22 from Republicans. The legislation stalled last week in part because Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wanted to block most of those amendments.

Reid issued a joint statement Thursday with Minority Leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. It read in part: "We met this evening with several of the senators involved in the immigration bill negotiations. Based on that discussion, the immigration bill will return to the Senate floor after completion of the energy bill."

On Tuesday, President Bush made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to coax Republican leaders in the Senate who stopped the bill to help revive it. In exchange, he announced $4.4 billion in spending on border security - a major concern for many Republicans.

Among other things, the fragile bill calls for increased border security, a crackdown on employers who hire undocumented immigrants and a complicated path to citizenship for most of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants.

If passed, the legislation would be the first to overhaul the broken immigration system in 20 years.

Susan Tully, national field director with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), argues that family-based immigration, also known as "chain immigration," isn't good for an America that has to compete with China and India.
"Immigrants should bring benefits to this country," she said. "Unfortunately, most of the people who come through chain immigration need our support."

The FAIR claims that most undocumented immigrants are getting a free ride because they don't pay taxes and they burden schools and hospitals.

Other risks associated with allowing millions of people to stay legally are that they will depress wages and the standard of living in the United States, Tully said. "Americans have to pay taxes, send kids to college and pay mortgages," she said. "Minimum wage is simply not an option for them, but these people are going to fly with it."

Rodolfo Gutierrez, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER), counters that wages have stagnated on their own. Blaming that on immigrants, he said, is unfair.

"Wages didn't go down in the past when immigrants were given status," he said. "They have low skills and do jobs that Americans don't want to do."

As for taxes, Gutierrez claims that 60 percent to 70 percent of the undocumented population in Minnesota report their income to the IRS --- a number strongly disputed by FAIR.

Asked if he would agree that immigrants are a burden to the system, Gutierrez said people are not factoring in their economic impact. Last year, undocumented immigrants contributed an estimated $1.6 billion to the local economy, he said.

President Bush, in an attempt to placate those who think the bill is amnesty and nothing else, said Tuesday that border protection would be the most important aspect of the bill.

The FAIR's Tully is skeptical. "It's nothing more than a show game by Bush and the Congress. American people are tired of that," she said, adding that only 200 of the 2,000 border patrol agents Bush promised previously have been hired so far.

She's hardly alone. Bush went to the Senate on Tuesday to try to persuade similarly skeptical Republicans, who are key to the revival of the stalled bill in the Senate.

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