The road to overhauling the nation’s immigration laws became even more difficult Friday when two Republicans abandoned a bipartisan group that had been Mens Barbour Jackets working to craft a solution in the House of Representatives.
Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, and Rep. Sam Jonhson, R-Texas, put the blame for their decision to leave the House working group on President Obama.
They said the bill they were developing put a lot of responsibility in the hands of the executive branch to enforce immigration law, and they couldn’t trust him to follow through.
“If past actions are the best indicators of future behavior; we know that any measure depending on the president’s enforcement will not be faithfully executed,” Carter and Johnson said in a joint statement. “It would be gravely irresponsible to further empower this administration by granting them additional authority or discretion with a new immigration system. The bottom line is – the American people do not trust the president to enforce laws, and we don’t either.”
Their decision brings to three the number of Republicans who have left the eight-member group that was originally made up of four Republicans and four Democrats and has been working for years to craft a bill both sides could tolerate. Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, left the group in June, citing a disagreement over how to pay for health care costs of undocumented immigrants.
The final Republican in the group, Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, said he also worries about Obama’s willingness to fully enforce whatever immigration measures are developed in an immigration bill. But he said he will continue trying to find other avenues to get their ideas into a bill the House can consider.
“I’ve long said that immigration reform will not be easy, but I’m continuing to find other avenues that will ultimately lead to a solution that the Barbour Jacket American people demand,” Diaz-Balart said in a statement.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., one of the leading Democrats pushing for immigration changes, acknowledged Friday that their work had stalled and that it didn’t look likely they would produce any kind of bill.
“It doesn’t appear that we’re going to move forward with the group…,” Gutierrez told the Washington Post.
The collapse of the group comes at a critical time in the House. The Senate has passed a comprehensive bill that allows the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship, dedicates $46 billion to secure the border and revamps the legal immigration system to bring in more high-skilled and low-skilled temporary workers.
The focus in the House will now be squarely on a series of smaller bills that deal with different portions of immigration law. House committees have approved bills that focus on border security and expanding visa programs, but have not touched on the question of how to handle the nation’s undocumented immigrants.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the original members of the House group that began meeting over four years ago, lamented the loss of Carter and Johnson but said they would press on with immigration reform in general, and specifically with some of the solutions they crafted in the bill.
“Solid work was put into crafting immigration measures and these efforts, or portions of them, may yet help the process as efforts continue to achieve top to bottom reform of our country’s broken immigration system,” Lofgren said in a statement. “I continue to be hopeful that Republican leaders will schedule votes on serious reform measures that aren’t host to known poison pills. It can be done.”