Senate Takes Detour on the Road to Comprehensive Immigration Reform

July 09, 2009

Sen. Schumer Announces Bill Introduction “By Labor Day” But Ineffective Piecemeal Amendments Approved Anyway

Washington, DC – Today, the Senate adopted more workplace enforcement and immigration-related amendments to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill they are debating.  Meanwhile, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Chair of the Immigration Subcommittee in the Senate, told reporters he plans to draft and introduce comprehensive immigration reform legislation by Labor Day.  The following is a statement by Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan, non-profit pro-immigrant advocacy organization in Washington.

The Senate took a detour this week taking votes to expand immigration enforcement strategies that amount to more piecemeal approaches that have been a proven failure for 20 years.  The Senate needs to get in line behind the President and Sen. Chuck Schumer who – along with a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives – committed to moving real reform forward this year.

Sen. Schumer – one of the grown ups in charge of moving immigration reform forward – wants a bill in motion by Labor Day.  Furthermore, ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush and ex-Clinton Chief of Staff Mack McClarty’s Council on Foreign Relations bipartisan panel put forward their best thinking for immigration reform earlier this week.  Based on the President’s commitment to moving forward at his immigration meeting last month, we expect to see the serious phase of the Senate’s debate on immigration commence at the end of the summer.

In the meantime, in response to schoolyard immigration bullies, the Senate adopted more border fencing and a vast expansion of the E-Verify program.  E-Verify simply has too many problems and data errors to be expanded at the rate the Senate plans to expand it and the result will be millions of citizens and non-citizens being forced to justify their right to work. 

These piecemeal approaches always backfire and miss the point: we cannot succeed in enforcing laws that are fundamentally broken.  We have to have a thorough, top-to-bottom overhaul of immigration that includes worker-verification that works, and addresses all of the genuine ways in which we need to reform our broken system.

The debate on comprehensive immigration reform is coming this fall and we are confident that thoughtful, serious Senators who desire a real solution for America will get a chance to think about and actually debate how the interrelated pieces of the immigration puzzle fit together. 

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