Immigration Reform Back on the

Agenda, But Still a Hard Sell

President Obama made his clearest statement yet as to the timing of his push to enact Comprehensive Immigration Reform, although made little reference to specifics. In remarks after a June 25 meeting with his Secretaries of Homeland Security and Labor and thirty senior members of Congress, the President stated that there is a consensus that “we need an effective way to recognize and legalize the status of undocumented workers who are here, ” and that “the American people are ready for us to do so”. He noted, however, that “it's going to require some heavy lifting, it's going to require a victory of practicality and common sense and good policymaking over short-term politics.”

To underscore that point, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel told the press earlier that day that there were insufficient votes in Congress to pass a comprehensive bill, and that one was unlikely to be passed during 2009. Instead, the White House would continue to focus on economic issues. 

One of the key sticking points in achieving a comprehensive bill is the perception that the economy remains too soft to enable members of Congress to vote on employment-based immigration issues, such as expanding the numbers of visas made available to for persons with science, technology, engineering and math experience, for example. The business community is concerned – rightly - that it may be politically impossible to expand employment-based visa programs unless it is linked to normalizing the status of illegal immigrants. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing the White House for expansion of guest worker programs and has indicated that it will withhold support for any immigration reform bill which fails to do so.

To restart the debate, the President announced that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would head a leadership group with members of the House and Senate that is supposed to methodically work through each issue.

On a more down to earth note, the President announced a renewed effort to speed up processing of USCIS petitions “which has been far too slow for far too long” and “to make the agency much more efficient, much more transparent, much more user-friendly than it has been in the past.” He then said he was assigning his Chief Information Officer, Chief Performance Officer, and Chief Technologies officer to work with USCIS to come up with a solution. 

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