Vowing they’ve learned the lessons from the 1986 amnesty, the Senate on Thursday approved the biggest changes to the immigration system in a generation, promising this latest version will prevent another wave of illegal immigrants while at the same time granting a pathway to citizenship to most of the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
The 69-32 vote, which saw 14 Republicans join all 54 of the chamber’s Democratic caucus members support it, is likely the high-water mark for immigrant-rights advocates, who held prayer vigils and watching parties Thursday in anticipation of good news for illegal immigrants who’ve been waiting, in some cases for years, for legal status.
“Shouldn’t we give them the same chance that we’ve given wave after wave of immigrants?” said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has worked on this issue for years and who was one of the eight senators who wrote the bill that passed.
The battle now shifts to the GOP-led House, where hours before Thursday’s final vote, Speaker John A. Boehner said the Senate bill is dead on arrival.
“The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes,” the Ohio Republican said flatly at his weekly press conference, before going on to attack the Senate version as too weak on border security.
The path Mr. Boehner laid out appears to lean toward a piecemeal approach to the issue, rather than the broad approach the Senate took in mixing legal immigration, enforcement and the status of illegal immigrants into a 1,200-page bill.
Senators gave Thursday’s vote the full pomp of landmark legislation, with Majority Leader Harry Reid asking that senators vote from their desks — a formality reserved for the biggest issues, such as the 2009 vote on President Obama’s health care law.
“It’s historic in nature,” said Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, who is one of the chief reasons the legislation has advanced so far this year.
Indeed, it was Mr. Reid’s re-election in 2010, followed by President Obama’s own re-election in 2012, that pushed immigration back to the fore of the political conversation.
Since Mr. Obama’s November victory congressional Republicans have held a fierce internal debate over whether they need to pass a legalization bill in order to be competitive with Hispanic voters in upcoming elections.
The crux of the Senate bill is a deal to offer quick legal status to illegal immigrants, but withholds full citizenship rights until some conditions are met.
The key difference between supporters and opponents has been over how strict to make those conditions. Democrats have said they don’t want to do anything that would interfere with the path to citizenship, and they have succeeded in beating back amendments to make the citizenship path contingent on provable success in reducing illegal immigration.
Instead, the bill ties citizenship to measures of spending and to whether certain infrastructure and manpower are in place.
The one major amendment that passed called for adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents to the southwest, and would push the Homeland Security Department to build an additional 350 miles of pedestrian fencing, which would, in many places, likely replace the vehicle barriers the government built in the last six or seven years after the last immigration debate.
Mr. McCain said the staffing, infrastructure and new technology are the guarantees he needs to be certain the failures of 1986 aren’t repeated.
“I can tell you from 30 years of being on the border, this bill secures the border and anyone who says it doesn’t does not understand our security needs,” the senator said.
But immigration law enforcement agencies said the Senate’s bill falls short on security.
The unions for both immigration agents and officers who handle legal immigration benefits called the legislation an “anti-public safety bill and an anti-law enforcement bill,” saying it will actually cut down on interior enforcement, which all sides agree is critical to preventing a new wave of illegal immigration.
“It provides legalization for thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more difficult for our officers to identify public safety and national security threats,” the two unions’ presidents said in a joint statement.
Even many of the Republicans who voted for the bill said it needs changes, and said they hoped the House would rescue the legislation.
But they portrayed their vote Thursday as a choice between a disastrous “de facto amnesty” now and an improvement under the Senate legislation.
“It is a good solution to a hard problem,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who helped write the bill.
The Senate bill would lead to between 7 and 8 million illegal immigrants gaining legal status and work permits. Several million of those — agriculture workers and young adults who were brought to the U.S. as children — will have an early shot at citizenship, while the rest will have to wait at least 10 years as the government spends money on border security.
The legislation creates several categories for future workers to come — many of them as new legal immigrants, and others as guest-workers, who are supposed to go home after their visa expire.
However the Congressional Budget Office said many of those guest-workers won’t go home, which means illegal immigration will continue even if the law is enacted. CBO said the bill would only cut down on about 25 percent of illegal immigration.
On the other hand, CBO said the bill will succeed in bolstering the U.S. economy and the taxes newly legalized immigrants and future immigrants will pay will help the federal deficit. Over the next 20 years immigrants will reduce deficits by a net of about $900 billion, CBO said.
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