Some Thoughts For My Friends in the Immigration Reform Community

I sent this letter to friends of ours in the immigration reform community last Thursday, July 24th. It had been passed on to several reporters who have called me about it so I decided to make it available to the public.

Friends,

Right now in the House of Representatives, the most powerful legislative body in the history of the world, there is a serious debate going on about immigration reform or the first time in nine years.  With Granger’s proposal, the House Republicans have now proposed or passed measures on border and interior enforcement, the legal status of over 1m undocumented immigrations and are even enormous and consequential changes to another law, Wilberforce, while taking modest steps on the supplemental the President requested.   The point is that they have through their own actions expanded this debate into terrain far beyond the supplemental, terrain that looks much more like traditional immigration reform.    We also know from news reports that it looks like Boehner will need Democratic votes to pass anything this summer.  

Thus, it is my recommendation that far more resources of this community be focused now on the House.   We need to push the Democrats to go big and demand that CIR be part of any potential deal with the Republicans, and force a full and robust debate about the need to fix our broken immigration system.   Even Jeb Bush took the House Rs to task for not stepping up on CIR in a WSJ oped today.   We also know that in the Senate it is unlikely that any supplemental will make it without changes to Wilberforce – thus once again the Rs are blocking progress, and focusing on deporting children.  

Simply put the Rs must pay a serious price for this politics and cannot get away without significant damage to their brand.  We need to put pressure on them to deal, and to get as much out of this process as we can, perhaps even CIR itself.   There is a huge opportunity emerging here, and I hope as many of you will step up and do things like protest outside McConnell and Boehner’s offices the way many have been protesting outside the White House.   I am convinced that one of the reasons the Republicans have not moved on CIR this year is that they see Obama and the Democrats getting attacked by their allies.   Why mess with that? 

Bottom line – we are in the midst in the one of the most important public debates about immigration the US has seen in the last ten years.  Time to stand and be counted. 

Good luck, and godspeed. 

S