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Question : Are Americans finally being heard on the hill?

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Is the will of “We the people” finally going to to hold sway on immigration into America?

WASHINGTON

The House and the Senate moved yesterday toward a piecemeal crackdown on illegal immigration, pushing forward separate bills to require photo identification to vote, build fences on the U.S.-Mexico border and speed the deportation of undocumented workers. The bills would take the place of President Bush’s far broader rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws.

Voting almost completely along party lines, the House voted 228-196 for a bill that would require all who register to vote in federal elections to show photo identification that proves that they are U.S. citizens.

The Senate, meanwhile, voted 94-0 to take up a bill passed by the House last week to build 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, with a final vote to come as early as Monday.

Today, the House is scheduled to take up bills to speed up the deportation of illegal immigrants, ratchet up penalties for immigrant gang members and human smugglers, end an exemption for Salvadoran illegal immigrants from rapid deportation, make it a crime to tunnel under the border, and overtly deputize state and local police officers to enforce federal immigration laws.

In an interview on CNN, Bush said he would sign the legislation, even though it does not embrace a more comprehensive approach – including a guest-worker program – that he has backed.

“Yes, I’ll sign it into law,” he said. “I would view this as an interim step. I don’t view this as a final product.”

Passage of the legislation – should it occur – would permit leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress to claim they have taken steps to deal with the flood of illegal immigrants. It is an issue that has rent the party, spawned demonstrations in many cities last spring, and called into question the Republicans’ ability to face tough issues.

“Border security is national security,” said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Rules Committee, with House GOP leaders by his side. “We’re going to try our daggonest to enact as many of these bills as we can.”

With little more than a week left before the Sept. 29 start of Congress’s scheduled recess, GOP leaders are considering appending some or all of the bills to a must-pass spending bill before they leave town. But Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the Appropriations Committee chairman, appeared to close off that avenue last night, saying he will not add any legislative language onto the spending bills that could slow their progress in the final days before the coming recess.

The sudden rush of activity startled immigrant and civil-rights groups, which had largely thought a legislative response on illegal immigration was dead for the year. The National Immigration Law Center sent out an “urgent” notice to allies to prod them into action, saying, “In recent days, there has been a serious deterioration of the position of pro-immigrant forces in Congress.”

The legislators’ embrace of a piecemeal approach came as members of a private task force on immigration repeated its belief that a comprehensive solution is necessary to solve the nation’s problems with illegal immigration. The task force’s plan includes strong border enforcement and a program that allows illegal immigrants already in the country to stay by paying a stiff fine.

But it also proposes that the president and Congress establish two federal organizations that would regulate the flow of immigrants and help them assimilate into society. Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was a co-chairman of the Migration Policy Institute task force with former Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., said that the House’s approach is too draconian against illegal immigrants, and a Senate bill approved in May is too complex.

Most of the provisions in the bills the legislators are now considering were plucked from the House’s border-security and anti-illegal-immigration bill that passed in December, then prompted protests this spring that brought millions of illegal immigrants into the streets. But Republicans say that the politics of illegal immigration have shifted in favor of their get-tough approach. Even some Republicans who have backed Bush’s approach, such as Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., said yesterday that the shift among voters in favor of “enforcement first” is palpable.

“While I’ve made it clear that I prefer a comprehensive solution, I have always said we need an enforcement-first approach to immigration reform,” said Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., the majority leader, who surprised many immigration-rights activists when he took up the House border-fencing bill.

Cecilia Munoz, the vice president of the National Council of La Raza, said that Republicans “are politically playing with fire” with Hispanic voters, who gave 40 percent of their vote to Bush in 2004.

The rhetoric in the House yesterday was particularly heated, with a stream of black and Hispanic Democrats taking to the floor to denounce a voter-ID bill that they called a “modern-day poll tax” intended to disenfranchise minority, elderly and disabled voters who lean Democratic.
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Best answer:

Answer by johncondo2001
they don’t care the tax payers