Thread: Immigration’s next hurdle: Obamacare

By JONATHAN ALLEN and CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 12/17/13 5:01 AM EST
POLITICO


Coming into 2013, immigration reform looked promising, but now it's stuck in the House. | AP Photos

The flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act has endangered another of President Barack Obama’s top agenda items: Immigration reform.

It’s forcing the White House and its allies to confront a basic, but politically potent, criticism. If the government can’t build a website, how can it be trusted to correctly process millions of undocumented immigrants and require every employer to verify the status of their workers?

The Obamacare struggles and the government shutdown sidetracked White House plans for a fall immigration campaign. And House Republicans have been able to avoid a major political hit for sitting on the Senate-passed bill in part due to their ability to draw attention to Obama’s broken promises on health care.

Coming into 2013, immigration reform looked promising — Obama and Democrats were pushing ahead, and Republicans wanted to move on after losing the Hispanic vote. But the legislation remains stalled in the House, where Speaker John Boehner has claimed immigration reform is “absolutely not” dead but has yet to say when it would come to the floor.

That the public may be more skeptical of the federal government’s capacity to run big programs effectively and efficiently is something conservatives will surely hold up as a reason not to expand the government’s footprint well into the future — setting up another hurdle for reform advocates to clear.

“There’s a loss of confidence in the government’s ability,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who backs the immigration bill, said at an event sponsored by the public relations firm Edelman this month. “Clearly, the last few months, our experience with Affordable Care Act does not help when you look at other big things like immigration reform.”

The Senate bill would beef up border enforcement, expand the nation’s temporary worker program, and create legalization pathways for the estimated 11 million people who are in the country illegally. That may be now too much for Congress to handle, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), both a lead co-sponsor of the Senate bill and leading Obamacare critic.

“It’s going to make it harder to sell big deals,” Graham said. “People are now saying, ‘So you’re gonna do immigration. You’re gonna let the same people manage the immigration system that’s managed Obamacare?’”

Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said the rocky Obamacare rollout “validated our warnings against jamming one massive bill that few have read and even fewer fully comprehend.”

“If the Obamacare train wreck has any lesson,” Buck said, “it’s that big policy challenges should be addressed deliberatively and one step at a time.”

Still, President Barack Obama and his allies have yet to adjust their strategy to fit a new reality that politicians on both the right and the left say has taken hold in the debate.

“If people are looking for an excuse not to do the right thing on immigration reform, they can always find an excuse — we’ve run out of time, or this is hard, or the list goes on and on,” Obama said at a news conference last month. “But my working assumption is people should want to do the right thing.”

His press secretary, Jay Carney, said the real comparison is in the public benefit of Obamacare and immigration.

“These are different systems,” Carney said Monday. “I would point to the extraordinary effort that’s gone into fixing the problems on HealthCare.gov, acknowledging the shortcomings — the serious, significant shortcomings, taking ownership and responsibility for them and acting to fix the problem. Because in the end — and this would be true of immigration reform as it is of HealthCare.gov or the ACA — the issue isn’t in the end how the process is; the process is performed in service of the legislation and the goal. And in this case, in immigration reform, it’s in service of a bill that would provide, when implemented, the benefits that we’ve described and that outside analysts have described.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said his private conversations with Republicans, as well as Boehner’s strike against tea party groups last week over the budget, make him believe that prospects for passage are brightening. Boehner’s recent hire of Rebecca Tallent, a former immigration aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has also fueled speculation that he’s preparing to make a move on immigration next year, possibly after the Republican primary season.

“I think the chances for immigration reform over the last month or two have only gotten better,” Schumer said.

But the clear danger is that conservative Republicans will make it politically difficult for their moderate counterparts to vote for a federal overhaul of the immigration system by raising the Obamacare experience. The ACA is now Exhibit A — a tangible item of evidence — in the argument.

The most direct comparison to HealthCare.gov may be the mandated expansion of E-Verify, an internet-based system for employers to check the immigration status of their workers. Within five years, all employers would need to run their workers through the system within days of their hiring. But the system, which has had pilot programs running for more than two decades, has been criticized as unreliable.

The bill’s various pathways to citizenship could also produce complications arising from the process of legalizing people through a series of pathways.

“It is definitely a cautionary tale, even for people who want immigration reform, because it is a huge implementation challenge,” said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration. “It will require a lot of attention and lessons learned from the ACA.”

The link between HealthCare.gov and immigration reform is “a topic that a lot of us who have worked on this for a long time have thought about considerably,” Meissner said. “If nothing else it ought to be putting the administration and others involved in implementation on notice that the implementation issues are serious and should be taken seriously.”

Charles Kamasaki, executive vice president of the National Council of La Raza, acknowledged some of the challenges but said they will be “nothing approaching the disaster” of the Affordable Care Act.

“Sure, we’ve noticed it,” he said. “Has it materially or significantly changed our strategy? No.”

He and other reform advocates insist there are significant differences between the two issues.

*Immigration reform won’t get through Congress without bipartisan support. That means both parties would be invested in making sure the government can implement the law – unlike Obamacare, which can trace many of its troubles back to the lack of buy-in from Republicans.
*Governors who opposed Obamacare were able to undercut the law by refusing to expand Medicaid, but they wouldn’t have the same leeway on immigration, which is the sole responsibility of the federal government.
*The Senate-passed bill sought to shield immigration reform from the whims of congressional appropriations by setting aside $22 billion up front for implementation.
*Immigration reform would build upon existing government programs — programs with an established outside support network of nonprofits and volunteers — while the Affordable Care Act involved creating from scratch an insurance marketplace that crossed 36 states and interacted with multiple federal agencies and private insurers.
*Since 2012, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has without fanfare processed about 500,000 young people under a program to defer deportation — “a trial run,” said Marshall Fitz, director of immigration policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Obama acknowledged last month that the troubled website would force him “to rebuild confidence around some of our initiatives.”

Two recent appointments were a step in the president’s effort to earn back credibility. John Podesta, a Democratic heavyweight, will focus on how to implement the president’s second-term agenda, including Obamacare and executive orders on climate change, while Phil Schiliro, a former White House liaison to the Hill, will focus solely on trying to head off policy problems with the Affordable Care Act.

Frank Sharry, a long-time immigration reform advocate and executive director of America’s Voice, said that it will be “a challenge for the federal government to implement landmark legislation,” but noted “the good news is it’s not going to be handled by HHS” and “the elements we are talking about are all in place.”

But Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who is among the House immigration-reform leaders, said it would be a mistake not to account for the effect Obamacare’s implementation might have on prospects for the immigration bill.

“That’s a legitimate cause for concern,” he said. “The government has a credibility problem in that area right now.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/1...ct-101224.html

Tuesday, 17 Dec 2013 10:24 AM
By Melanie Batley
newsmax.com

President Barack Obama's ambitious and once promising plans to pass a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration system have been sidetracked amid the fallout from the botched implementation of Obamacare, which continues to dog the administration.

According to Politico, the diversion over the troubled healthcare law has enabled House Republicans to avoid divisive debate on the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate in the summer. Doubts, meanwhile, are mounting about the administration's competence to manage the complexity of a reformed immigration system, given the problems with the healthcare law.

"There's a loss of confidence in the government's ability," former Los Angeles Major Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and proponent of the immigration reform bill, said at an event this month, according to Politico.

"Clearly, the last few months, our experience with [the] Affordable Care Act does not help when you look at other big things like immigration reform."

Conservatives may be able to mount a credible case in the public eye against the government's ability to manage major programs by capitalizing on the widespread skepticism of Obamacare, according to Politico.

The Senate immigration bill would create a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants, strengthen border security, and expand the temporary worker program. Those plans are increasingly looking too ambitious to achieve in the current divisive partisan environment.

"It's going to make it harder to sell big deals" South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lead co-sponsor of the Senate immigration bill, told Politico. "People are now saying, 'So you're gonna do immigration. You're gonna let the same people manage the immigration system that's managed Obamacare?'"

House Speaker John Boehner's spokesman, Brendan Buck, echoed those sentiments, saying that the troubled rollout of Obamacare "validated our warnings against jamming one massive bill that few have read and even fewer fully comprehend."

"If the Obamacare train wreck has any lesson, it's that big policy challenges should be addressed deliberatively and one step at a time," he said.

The Obama administration, however, is trying to sever the link between the two issues, even though it acknowledges that the drop in public confidence over Obamacare may have an effect on its other policy initiatives.

"These are different systems," White House Press secretary Jay Carney said, according to Politico. "I would point to the extraordinary effort that's gone into fixing the problems on HealthCare.gov, acknowledging the shortcomings — the serious, significant shortcomings, taking ownership and responsibility for them and acting to fix the problem.

"Because in the end — and this would be true of immigration reform as it is of the HealthCare.gov or the ACA — the issue isn't in the end how the process is; the process is performed in service of the legislation and the goal. And in this case, in immigration reform, it's in service of a bill that would provide, when implemented, the benefits that we've described and that outside analysts have described."

Other leading Democrats, meanwhile, say they are hopeful the GOP House leadership will move forward on legislation now that it has shown in the most recent round of budget negotiations that it will not be beholden to the policy agenda of tea party groups.

"I think the chances for immigration reform over the last month or two have only gotten better," New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer told Politico.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/imm...2/17/id/542296

by Tony Lee 18 Dec 2013, 1:43 PM PDT
breitbart.com



The botched Obamacare rollout may threaten the fate of comprehensive immigration reform, as Americans are frustrated with the disastrous Healthcare.gov website and may also be skeptical of the federal government's ability to deliver on various border security and E-verify measures reliant on computer technology.

Even Politico had to ask, "If the government can’t build a website, how can it be trusted to correctly process millions of undocumented immigrants and require every employer to verify the status of their workers?"

That is the question to which Americans will be demanding answers when the House likely takes up comprehensive immigration reform at the beginning of next year. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, said Americans have lost more confidence with the government after Obamacare. "Our experience with Affordable Care Act does not help when you look at other big things like immigration reform.”

The Senate bill that passed, in addition to lowering the wages of working class Americans, would purportedly have measures in place to expand the country's temporary worker program and the E-Verify system--criticized as unreliable--and enact more border security measures.

As Breitbart News has reported, border security measures proposed in the House have been criticized for their "meaningless metrics" that would rely on government's use of various technologies and would be susceptible to manipulation for political purposes.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...th-Immigration