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WASHINGTON
U.S. Senate

Bipartisan group pushes immigration plan

Alan Gomez
USA TODAY
Condoleezza Rice joined others in the Bipartisan Policy Center to push a set of recommendations for immigration.
  • Group includes former U.S. secretary of State Rice and former Pennsylvania governor Rendell
  • Recommendations include immigration ideas from Republicans and Democrats
  • Critics say it is a cloak for another immigration amnesty

A group of former Republican and Democrat officeholders unveiled recommendations Thursday for how Washington should overhaul the nation's immigration laws.

Members of the Bipartisan Policy Center praised the work done on a sweeping immigration bill that passed the Senate in June and said the House is making good progress of its own. They released a set of recommendations Thursday that they say brings together concepts embraced by members in both chambers.

"You've got a pretty broad range of views represented, and yet we find that it is possible to find common ground," said Michael Chertoff, who was a secretary of Homeland Security under Republican President George W. Bush.

The group is chaired by two Republicans — former secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour — and two Democrats — former Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

The main recommendations released by the group focus on border security, a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants and changing the nation's legal immigration system. In many cases, they combine ideas embraced by the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House.

The group's recommendations state that "national security depends on America's ability to enforce its immigration laws at the border." The Senate bill would send nearly 20,000 more Border Patrol agents to the nation's southwest border to help do that.

The group said it is necessary for the federal government to develop a better way to understand what exactly is going on at the border. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is pushing a bill that would require the Department of Homeland Security to spend six months developing a way to better measure the state of border security.

Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes the Senate bill and advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said the inclusion of a couple of Republicans in the Bipartisan Policy Center does not mean that its recommendations reflect the thinking of conservatives around the country.

"Everybody's trying to cloak themselves in the mantle of conservatism because they think it's advantageous to convince the House to do what the Senate has done," Mehlman said. "The question is, is there a consensus of opinion among the American people? And I don't think there is."

The group emphasized another border security issue — people who enter the country legally but overstay their visas. The Senate bill did not originally include an "entry-exit" system to fingerprint foreigners as they leave the country, a system many Republicans wanted to track who had overstayed their visas. That was a big concern because 40% of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who live in the USA entered the country that way.

The Senate adopted a scaled-down version of an exit-entry system proposed by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, which would be implemented at 10 airports within two years and 30 airports within six years.

The bipartisan center supported the Senate's plan of granting temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants as they work toward green cards and legalization, a proposal that has drawn sharp criticism in the Republican-led House.

"If there is a rigorous path to citizenship ... I'm comfortable with that," Barbour said.

The group plans on distributing its recommendations to members of Congress, who are due back to Washington in September to resume negotiations over immigration.

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