GOP budges on kids of illegals, not enough for Democrats

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., listens to the debate on immigration Tuesday on Capitol Hill. He called the GOP stand on illegal immigrants’ children a good sign, but said the proposal “missed the mark by a long shot.”
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., listens to the debate on immigration Tuesday on Capitol Hill. He called the GOP stand on illegal immigrants’ children a good sign, but said the proposal “missed the mark by a long shot.”

WASHINGTON - House Republicans took a tentative step toward offering citizenship to some illegal aliens Tuesday but hit an immediate wall of resistance from the White House on down as Democrats said it wasn’t enough.

The dismissive reaction to the GOP proposal to offer eventual citizenship to some people brought illegally to the U.S. as children underscored the difficulties of finding any compromise in the Republican-led House on the politically explosive issue of immigration.

That left prospects cloudy for one of President Barack Obama’s top second-term priorities. Congress is preparing to break for a month-long summer recess at the end of next week without action in the full House on any immigration legislation, even after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill last month to secure the borders and create a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal aliens in the country.

At a hearing of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee Tuesday on how to deal with aliens brought here illegally as children, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., suggested that “we as a nation should allow this group of young people to stay in the U.S. legally.” House Republican leaders have embraced offering citizenship to such illegal aliens, and Goodlatte is working on a bill with Majority Leader Eric Cantor toward that goal.

It is something of a turnaround for Republicans, many of whom in the past have opposed legalizing foreigners brought here as youths. And some Democrats and immigration advocates said it was a welcome development that shows that the GOP has moved forward since it nominated a presidential candidate last year, Mitt Romney, who suggested that people in the U.S. illegally should “self-deport.”

At the House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Rosa Velazquez, 30, of De Queen, Ark., planned to speak for illegal aliens brought as children to the U.S. Thus far, this is the only group of illegal aliens for whom House Republican leaders have been willing to consider granting legalization.

Velazquez had enrolled in college with a music scholarship after years of practice and competitions. She’d already chosen her classes at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas and was at the financial-aid office when officials asked whether she was a U.S. citizen.

“Of course, I am a citizen,” Velazquez recalls telling them in 2002 as they were looking for her records. That’s when her mother, Rosalinda, told her that they were in the U.S. illegally. Velazquez lost her scholarship and instead went to community college.

“I knew that it was really messed up, and I knew that it was really unfair,” Velazquez said in an interview.

Velazquez is part of United We Dream, a group that advocates citizenship for illegal aliens in the U.S. She’s pursuing two master’s degrees and helps her mother at her taco stand.

Even before the hearing began, Democrats dismissed Goodlatte and Cantor’s not yet-released legislation, saying that any solution that doesn’t offer citizenship to all 11 million illegal aliens falls short.

Over Twitter, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer slammed “the cruel hypocrisy of the GOP immigration plan: allow some kids to stay but deport their parents.”

That drew an angry response from Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who is chairman of the immigration subcommittee. After reading Pfeiffer’s tweet aloud at the hearing, Gowdy labeled Pfeiffer “a demagogic, self-serving, political hack.”

Cantor spokesman Rory Cooper also responded to Pfeiffer, asking over Twitter: “If White House opposes effort to give children path to staying in only country they know, how serious are they about immigration reform?”

In fact, Democrats and immigration advocates pushed hard in past years for legislation offering citizenship to aliens brought in as youths. The Dream Act passed in the House in 2010 when that chamber was controlled by Democrats, but it was blocked by Senate Republicans.

Some Democrats and outside advocates also contended that Republicans were advancing a politically attractive measure just to give themselves cover to avoid dealing with all the immigrants in the country illegally. They noted that as recently as June the House’s GOP majority voted to overturn an Obama administration policy halting deportations of some immigrants brought to the U.S. as youths - a policy put in place after Congress failed to pass the Dream Act.

“Don’t be fooled. This is not about the Dream Act. It’s about politics and the Republicans’ attempt to make it look like they are taking immigration reform seriously,” said a statement from the Fair Immigration Reform Movement.

Republicans warned that such opposition could backfire.

“Attempts to group the entire 11 million into one homogenous group in an effort to secure a political remedy will only wind up hurting the most vulnerable,” said Gowdy.

Cantor and Goodlatte’s legislation is expected to be narrower in scope than the Dream Act, which would have offered legal status to people under age 35 who arrived in the U.S. before age 16 and had lived here for five years and obtained high school diplomas. Slightly more than 2.1 million illegal aliens could have qualified, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute.

Several GOP lawmakers voiced support at Tuesday’s hearing for some solution for immigrants brought illegally as kids. But the sentiment was not universal.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a leading immigration hard-liner, said such an approach would amount to “backdoor amnesty” that would “sacrifice the rule of law on the altar of political expediency.”

Last week, King came under attack for comments he made to the conservative news website Newsmax, where he downplayed the idea that many illegal alien youths are high-achieving. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King said.

Rep. Joe Garcia, D-Fla., told King that such language is “offensive, and it is beneath the dignity of this body and this country.”

Meanwhile, earlier Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, insisted that though House Republicans have rejected the Senate bill, they are committed to dealing with immigration, they just want to do it in a step-by-step and deliberate fashion.

“Nobody has spent more time trying to fix a broken immigration system than I have,” Boehner said.

White House spokesman Jay Carney responded to that with derision.

“The idea that you can - oh, I don’t know - declare yourself to have been more committed than anyone to improve our immigration system and then have nothing to show for it is a little laughable,” Carney said.

Arizona Republican John McCain, an author of the Senate plan, said senators are eager to negotiate a cross-chamber compromise on legalization for immigrants’ children and that the proposal Cantor is crafting might move them closer to that goal.

“Whatever they want to do, we want to negotiate, with respect,” McCain said in an interview at the Capitol. Asked whether he thought the House proposal was the best chance for a legalization proposal, McCain replied, “Maybe. I don’t know.”

While he called the Republican position on illegal immigrants’ children a sign of “new openness,” Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois said the House needs to do more.

“I will celebrate the beginning with them but they should understand, if that’s it, then they missed the mark by a long shot,” Gutierrez, a member of the Judiciary panel and the bipartisan immigration group, said in an interview. “And they would not be rewarded or recognized very quickly for it.”

Meanwhile, Velazquez said she will continue to seek citizenship for herself and her mother, although she’s concerned about speaking out as an illegal alien.

Velazquez’s mother flew to the U.S. when Velazquez was 5, also bringing her 4-year-old son, Rudy. Velazquez said her mother decided to stay in the U.S. to give her children better opportunities than they had in Mexico City.

“Giving our parents something different is creating like a second class of citizens that are not citizens,” Velazquez said. “I want to understand why it is only possible for me and my brother. If anyone deserves citizenship, it’s her because of her courage,” she said of her mother.

Information for this article was contributed by Erica Werner of The Associated Press, and by Roxana Tiron and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/24/2013

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