The Democrats have gotten the great Republican hope, Marco Rubio, to sign on to a measure that accomplishes nearly all of their goals on immigration:
“The pre-bill marketing campaign — driven by leaks that seemed to come from Republican negotiators — focused on stringent new border-control measures and a long, difficult path to citizenship. The goal was to minimize conservative opposition by creating a first impression of the bill as a tough solution to the country’s illegal immigration problem. But when Democrats got a look at the 844-page measure, they discovered that their negotiators extracted more concessions than they thought possible. Those include an expansive version of the DREAM Act and subtle but meaningful tradeoffs on all the major pieces of the system, from family reunification to legalization and border security… Republicans succeeded in making the path to legalization contingent upon the government meeting border security benchmarks, prohibiting undocumented immigrants from accessing federal benefits even as they pay taxes, blocking a provision to allow foreign spouses of same-sex couples to apply for visas, and creating a temporary worker program. But in return, Democrats got what Mary Giovagnoli, a former Kennedy immigration aide and director of the Immigration Policy Center, called an “extremely generous legalization program.”
About the only thing they didn’t get was their preferred cutoff date of December 31, 2012. Everything else is in there.
The problem for the Republican Party is that either path they follow on the immigration policy front leads to all sorts of bad things.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/23/the_immigration_trap_118080.html#ixzz2RJTBUyCw
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