WASHINGTON — The most significant overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws in a generation easily cleared the final obstacle to passage in the Senate on Thursday, when 68 senators, including 14 Republicans, voted to end debate on the bill and move to a final vote.
The bill is expected to pass the Senate with strong bipartisan support as early as Thursday, but similar legislation faces an uncertain fate in the Republican-controlled House, where there is significant opposition from conservative members.
The Senate bill offers a 13-year path to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, as well as tough border security provisions that must be in place before the immigrants can gain legal status.
Though overhauling the nation’s immigration system became a priority for many Republicans after the 2012 presidential election, in which Mitt Romney was defeated soundly among Hispanic voters, immigration opponents have mounted last-ditch efforts to derail the bill, which they say would offer amnesty without any real enforcement measures.
The legislation — drafted largely behind closed doors by a bipartisan group of eight senators — brought together an unlikely coalition of Democrats and Republicans, business groups and labor unions, farmworkers and growers, and Latino, gay rights, and immigration advocates. Along the way, the legislation was shaped and tweaked by a series of backroom deals and negotiations that, in many ways, seemed to mirror its inception.
The first big deal came early on, at the end of March, when the nation’s top labor and business groups reached an agreement on a guest worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Disagreements between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main federation of labor unions, had helped doom a 2007 attempt at a similar overhaul, but the two groups came together to create a program that will expand and shrink based on economic indicators — like the unemployment and job openings figures — and offer a maximum of 200,000 guest visas annually.
The group of senators who wrote the legislation had hoped it would receive overwhelming bipartisan support — as many as 70 votes, some senators suggested — to help propel it through the House, and when the bill moved to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the group took pains to win bipartisan support there, too.
In an effort led by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and an author of the bill, the group wooed Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, addressing his concerns about visas for skilled foreign workers who could fill jobs in the high-tech industry. Ultimately, the panel agreed to provisions by Mr. Hatch that raise the annual minimum number of visas for high-skilled foreign workers and create a market-based mechanism to ensure that companies in the United States can bring in qualified foreign workers for jobs that cannot be filled by Americans.
On the final night of consideration by the panel, in emotional and moving testimony, both Democratic and Republican senators argued against taking up a measure that would have allowed United States citizens to apply for permanent resident status, known as a green card, on behalf of their same-sex partners. Though Democrats supported the measure, Republicans said such a provision would have doomed the overall bill, and the debate largely became moot on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court ruled that married same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits.
The bill passed through the committee, in a process that stretched over five days and included the consideration of more than 300 amendments, on a strong 13-to-5 bipartisan vote, with Mr. Hatch, as well as Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans and members of the bipartisan group, supporting the bill. (In a recent op-ed article, Mr. Hatch also declared his support for the final legislation).
The bill’s largest, and perhaps most critical, change came in the form of a border security package that promised to substantially bolster security along the nation’s southern border. The proposal, by Senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota, both Republicans, would devote roughly $40 billion over the next decade to border enforcement measures, including adding 20,000 new Border Patrol agents and 700 miles of fencing along the southern border.
The amendment, which passed Wednesday with broad bipartisan support, helped bring along more than a dozen reluctant Republicans, who were hesitant to support the overall bill without a clear plan to secure the southern border, in order to ward off a future wave of illegal immigration. -NEW YORK TIMES
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