Dear Readers:
Well, a full year after the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill, it now appears that the House has changed course and immigration reform legislation is not likely. There have been many reasons offered on why the bill died. Some point to the humanitarian crisis on the border. Others point to Eric Cantor’s shocking primary loss. Republicans say it’s the President’s fault because he can’t be trusted to enforce.
Whatever the reason, the President confirmed in a Rose Garden press conference that he received a call recently from Speaker Boehner telling him there would not be an immigration bill coming this year and that the President would pursue executive actions later in the summer. Now the most important question is what the President is planning and what, if anything, Congress will do in reaction to this. Many are speculating that the President will offer new measures to help immigrant well beyond the narrow population of DREAMers. There are also measures relating to legal immigration the President can offer.
Another question is whether comprehensive immigration reform is dead. CIR is the idea that the broad range of immigration problems should be addressed in a massive immigration bill. There are a couple of advantages to this approach. First, you bring together a lot of allies who care about different aspects of reform. Second, you can potentially more effectively fix a broken immigration system by making major changes across all parts of the immigration code instead of making incremental changes.
But for anti-immigration forces, comprehensive immigration reform is also easier to fight. In a massive immigration bill, there are going to be lots of provisions that are easy to attack. And that’s exactly what has happened. Prior to President Bush introducing the concept of comprehensive immigration reform in his famous Oval Office address in 2004, immigration reform mainly happened in a piecemeal fashion. In a given year, a couple of dozen small bills would pass each year and many were less controversial bipartisan measures. Every five to ten years a major bill would pass, but not anything nearly as ambitious as what the Senate proposed last year.
My personal view is that after ten years of trying to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill, pro-immigration advocates should put that strategy to the side and go back to aiming for smaller measures. Should the balance of power in Congress change appreciably in the next few years, then it might make sense to revisit comprehensive reform. But so many things need to be fixed right now and so many solutions could probably get bipartisan support that we should aim for the achievable. The comprehensive approach made sense as long as comprehensive reform was politically possible. But I don’t hear many reform advocates still saying that’s the case.
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In firm news, this will be the last issue for Associate Editor Bailey Hutchison. Bailey is off to pursue adventures in Europe and we at Siskind Susser wish her the very best. She’s focused a lot of her efforts here on getting the new Visalaw.com ready to go and in the next few weeks, we’ll be launching the new site. Bailey will be gone, but she’ll be leaving a nice legacy with the new site. Good luck, Bailey!
Bailey is being succeeded by Rose Baker who is currently a contributor to the Bulletin. Rose has big shoes to fill, but she’s very talented and we’re looking forward to seeing great work from her.
Last month was the annual meeting of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Siskind Susser lawyers were well-represented on the speaker panels. I spoke as well as Cheryl Williams and Ari Sauer. And I’m excited that Ari Sauer was elected to the AILA Board of Governors where he and I will both be serving. AILA has twenty-one at large directors and it’s extremely rare that two lawyers from the same firm are elected to serve simultaneously. I’m glad AILA’s 11,000+ members have decided to entrust Ari and I to work on behalf of the organization.
Regards,
Greg Siskind
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