Thread: Look! Menendez on C-Span Now

What channel are you watching? I am not seeing it on cspan or cspan2

It was on C-Span this morning on open phones. It's over now.

Menendez is incompetent and apparently illiterate (he has only responded to me once right before the election so I assume he cannot read or write).

To Menendez, Bill Sells Families Short

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2007; Page A21

Sen. Robert Menendez is a first-generation American in a family of Cuban immigrants, a man who has referred to his parents as the embodiment of the American Dream. The New Jersey Democrat says the country's broken immigration system must be fixed, and last year he backed an unsuccessful reform bill.

Of the handful of senators who have been working on a new immigration bill, Menendez might be expected to be a key player.

The immigration bill's emphasis on job skills ahead of family ties is misguided, says Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). (By Jeff Fusco -- Getty Images)

Yet he quit the bipartisan group that reached the compromise being voted on this week. Frustrated by some of the compromises in the proposal that he says lessen the importance of family ties to new immigrants, he is now working from outside the coalition and could have enormous impact on the legislation -- how it might be amended in the Senate and whether it passes at all.

Republican and Democratic negotiators who wrote the immigration bill balanced their interests in a way so that Democrats could give legal status to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants while Republicans could change the criteria for future immigrants from those with family ties to those with skills and education. The negotiators have called it "the grand bargain" and say any change to the balance of interests could destroy support for the bill.

The bill would allow U.S. citizens to bring only spouses and children younger than 18 to the United States. Currently, citizens also can bring parents and adult children.

Menendez says the bill abandons decades of U.S. immigration policy built on the assumption that family ties are a top priority. "Under their bill, my father and mother would never have made it here," said Menendez, adding that he walked away from negotiations because he could not persuade the other lawmakers to make blood ties a priority. "The parents of Colin Powell would probably not have made it, or Jonas Salk or Bob Hope or plenty of others I consider great Americans."

"In the community where I'm from, it's Cuban Americans who came to where the main commercial strip was boarded up and they revitalized area, contributed taxes, opened new businesses, generated jobs. And that was replicated with the Vietnamese, with the Asian American community, again and again," he said. "All of those contributions weren't driven by being a high-tech worker. They don't necessarily have the entrepreneurial spirit."

The proposed system would favor well-educated immigrants from Asia, especially India, China and South Korea, while making immigration far more difficult for people from Latin America, especially Mexico, where most who move to the United States lack a high school diploma.

One of Menendez's amendments would change the criteria for admitting immigrants, increasing the value of family ties.

He also wants to change the deadline for reducing the backlog of family members waiting to enter the United States. The pending bill would immediately clear the backlog of 4 million family members who applied to enter this country before May 2005. Menendez would shift the date to January 2007 -- the bill's cutoff for illegal immigrants who could gain legal status. It would add more than 800,000 family applicants.

"These are over 800,000 people who played by the rules, didn't violate any law, did the right thing," Menendez said. "But all of those who did the right thing, their rights are extinguished because of an arbitrary date."

Another of his amendments would increase the number of legal-permanent-resident visas for parents of U.S. citizens and lengthen the duration of a new parent visitor visa.

His proposals have the backing of major pro-immigration groups.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a chief Republican negotiator of the compromise bill, has dismissed most of those ideas as "killer amendments" and said that if they pass, he would work to defeat the bill he helped write.

Menendez says his efforts belong within the framework of the compromise, an argument he will make when his amendments are debated on the Senate floor as early as today.

"I don't believe family reunification efforts are truly outside of the grand bargain," he said. "I'm living within the framework. I'm simply making it what I believe to be better. No one has a monopoly on how to pursue grand immigration reform."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01894.html?