House GOP caucus grapples with immigration issue

just about 50-50,” he said.

What all participants appeared to agree on was that they did not trust the Obama administration to enforce either immigration laws or border security provisions. A statement release after the meeting said:

The American people want our border secured, our laws enforced, and the problems in our immigration system fixed to strengthen our economy. But they don’t trust a Democratic-controlled Washington, and they’re alarmed by the president’s ongoing insistence on enacting a single, massive, Obamacare-like bill rather than pursuing a step-by-step, common-sense approach to actually fix the problem.
The president has also demonstrated he is willing to unilaterally delay or ignore significant portions of laws he himself has signed, raising concerns among Americans that this administration cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill like the one passed by the Senate.

The House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees have approved five separate pieces of immigration legislation, but these measures do not address the eleven million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. The chairmen of these panels, Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas) discussed these bills at the beginning of the meeting.

Darrell Issa (R-California), chairman of Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the House will deal with the eleven million undocumented immigrants, but that the House will not treat them is belonging to one unified block. Rather, a House measure to deal with the problem will break this group into three categories. “Those who should remain, those who should not remain, and those who would fall within guest workers or other programs.”

Issa said that “We expect to have fully comprehensive immigration reform,” but stressed that House GOP members were determined to avoid mistakes made in 1986, when the Reagan administration pushed through Congress an amnesty measure for undocumented immigrants then living in the United States, but without accompanying the move with tighter border security. As result, the measure, rather than resolving the issue once and for all, ended up exacerbating it because it served as a magnet for even more illegal immigrants to come to the United States.

The Hill notes that Boehner has encouraged a bipartisan group of House lawmakers to put together a comprehensive proposal. That group, of whichRepresentatives John Carter (R-Texas) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Florida) are members, has been meeting away from the public eye for more than four years now, and sources say its members have developed a 500-page bill, but it has yet to be released.