Texas Republican lawmakers introduce border security bill

immigration reform, Cornyn told reporters Tuesday during a conference call. “We think it’s important that Congress, whether it’s the House or the Senate, as we address all of these issues on the context of immigration reform, that members have this to inform their judgments.”

Cornyn’s office said the measure has support from key border groups, including the Border Trade Alliance, the Texas Border Coalition, and the South Texans’ Property Rights Association.

Cornyn also said that in private conversations with Senators Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), both members of  the Gang of Eight, they were surprised to learn that  there is no way currently to evaluate DHS’s progress on  border security.

The Border Network for Human Rights, an organization that supports immigration reform, called the pair’s bill nothing more than a political ploy.

“We all agree there needs to be a way to measure what DHS is doing at the border and whether or not it is working. But now that ‘operational control’ has been scrapped, maybe we can look at whether DHS has done everything that politicians have asked for in the past,” Cristina Parker, communications director for the organization, said in a statement.

Parker added that since 2007, DHS expanded drone use and built hundreds of miles of walls and fencing as well as doubled the number of agents on the ground, a fact the U.S. Border Patrol routinely advertises.

“It’s obvious to those of us who actually live and work at the border that we are a political football in the immigration debate,” Parker told theTribune.

According to Jeremy Robbins, the director of the Partnership for a New American Economy, a bipartisan group of business owners and elected officials which advocate for immigration reform, there are two side to the immigration debate. One side notes that b the border needs to be secured before moving forward on giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The other side says that if the  system is overhauled, then illegal entries would become less of a problem because of additional legal methods to enter.

“I think we are somewhere in the middle but certainly closer to the latter in the sense that the first position just doesn’t make sense empirically,” Robbins told theTribune. “There is no number of people you can put on the border and fix the problem. People are coming here to work, and 40 percent of the people here are overstaying their visas. They are not coming across the border [illegally],” Robbins added.