In the brewing debate over immigration reform, increasing the number of visas for highly skilled immigrants is one of the few policy goals that President Obama and Republicans could seemingly, on the surface, now agree. However, earlier this month White House officials, told reporters that the president will not agree to raise the visa caps without changes that include a path to citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million individuals living illegally in the United States, according to a Bloomberg report.
President Obama’s approach makes it difficult for the Republican party, which is struggling to find a policy its factions can accept. For many House Republicans from border and southern states “legalization” or allowing current illegal immigrants to become citizens is tantamount to “mass amnesty.”
However, Republican party leaders and other prominent conservators–House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Senator Mark Rubio of Florida–are working to create a compromise. At this point, Senator Mark Rubio has outlined the only concrete compromise, which would require undocumented workers to pay back taxes and a fine, participate in a guest-worker program, and wait several years for a green card.
But, Republicans that might agree with such an approach may be hesitant to say so. Congress’s last major immigration bill in 2006 failed, and Republicans who supported the effort were besieged with angry calls by anti-immigration groups. However, this time, Republicans for Immigration Reform, a new super political action committee, says it will provide cash and political cover to Republicans willing to back a bill. “We want members to know there are resources that will be available to them if they support a broad-based approach to reform,” says co-founder Charles Spies, a former counsel for Restore Our Future, a super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.
Optimism by some seems to be growing that the immigration issue can be retooled as a conservative issue Republicans can get behind. “If you’re for the free market, which are the basic tenets of Reagan conservatism, then you can’t be against immigration,” said Alfonso Aguilar, a former immigration adviser to former President George W. Bush and now executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, a Washington advocacy group pressing for immigration reform.
