CNN.com: Immigration Bill Dead in Senate

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's immigration bill essentially died Thursday in the Senate, when members voted against advancing the controversial legislation.

The tally was 46 to 53, 14 votes shy of the 60 needed to end debate.

The president, who visited the Capitol this month to push hard for the legislation, delivered a brief statement shortly after the vote saying he was "sorry" Congress could not reach agreement, calling its "failure to act" a "disappointment."

"Congress really needs to prove to the American people that it can come together on hard issues," Bush said.

The bill would have provided a path to citizenship for some of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and toughens border security. (Watch senators' passionate arguments for and against the bill before the vote )

Explaining his reasons for voting against the bill, GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, a leading critic of the measure, said "it would not work."

"Our analysis was that it would result in 8.7 million more people in the next 20 years here illegally," he said.

Thursday's vote represented a "sad day for America," said Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York.

"Everyone knows that our immigration laws are broken," Schumer said. "And a country loses some of its greatness when it can't fix a problem that everyone knows is broken. And that's what happened today."

Supporters and opponents of the controversial legislation said that it probably won't be resurrected until after the 2008 elections.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff echoed Bush, expressing his disappointment.

"I'm disappointed about the fact that there were some necessary tools which we needed to be able to do more than we can currently do in enforcing the law that were left on the floor of the Senate today," Chertoff said.

Among those tools, Chertoff said, were a mandatory employment verification system, tamper proof cards for undocumented workers, additional penalties, procedural tools and $4.4 billion in additional funds "that would have been a welcome resource."

Enforcement issues were a main concern for Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who said his "no" vote sent a crystal clear message "that the American people want us to start with enforcement, both at the border and at the workplace, and don't want promises. They want action, they want results, they want proof, because they've heard all the promises before."

Sessions said there would be "no permanent hard feelings over this among the people who wanted to pass a bill they thought would help America."

Backers of the bill, Sessions said, were simply "trying to work a compromise to pass something" and called on members "next time" to pass legislation that "will work."

The controversial bill won support and derision from both sides of the political aisle. Those voting in favor included 12 Republicans. Sixteen Democrats voted against it and 18 senators switched their votes from an earlier vote to advance the bill on Tuesday.

Those who voted "no" on Thursday included three Democratic freshman -- Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb -- who won close races last year against conservative Republicans.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid said the defeat is "not a time for pointing fingers. It's not a time for casting blame. It's a time for recognition that immigration is a problem that needs to be fixed."

On Wednesday, supporters beat back a number of potentially fatal amendments.

Proponents won a major victory with defeat of an amendment removing the bill's most controversial feature -- a path to legalization and eventual citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country, which critics charge amounts to amnesty.

Senators voted 56-41 to table his amendment, effectively killing it. However, in a sharp illustration of the political heartburn the "amnesty" debate is causing Republicans, Bond's proposal was supported by 33 of the Senate's 49 GOP members, along with eight Democrats.

Also defeated Wednesday was an amendment by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, that would have required adult illegal immigrants to return to their home country within two years in order to apply for a new type of visa that will allow them to stay in the United States indefinitely.

SF Chronicle:EEVS Unworkable

Planned worker ID called vulnerable

Effort to control immigration could boost identity theft

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Monday, June 25, 2007

(06-25) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The linchpin of all new proposals to control illegal immigration, including a Senate bill up for reconsideration this week, is an electronic employer verification system to shut off the job magnet that has attracted millions of illegal workers to the United States.

A government that cannot issue passports to 3 million U.S. citizens in time for summer holidays is expected to create a vast work-authorization system for more than 7 million U.S. employers and eventually all 146 million U.S. workers that is quick, accurate and safe.

Yet according to a confidential new study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, the system that would do this -- known as Web Basic Pilot -- is vulnerable to identity theft, employer misuse, privacy breaches and data inaccuracies. Heavy enforcement would be required to prevent it from being evaded by illegal workers and employers alike.

Under the Senate bill, the Web Basic Pilot employee verification system would be expanded from a small, voluntary test involving 17,000 employers to a nationwide program starting 18 months after enactment. Employers would use it to check government databases held by the Social Security Administration and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to determine if a new hire is authorized to work as a citizen, legal permanent resident or temporary worker.

Within three years, all workers, including U.S. citizens, would be checked.

The idea is to fix a fatal flaw in the 1986 immigration overhaul that made it illegal to hire unauthorized workers, but was never fully enforced because of rampant document fraud. The need for a new system is so universally accepted that its scope and implementation have drawn perhaps less scrutiny than any other aspect of immigration reform.

But while Web Basic Pilot is good at detecting fake documents, it is wide open to identity theft -- where a person may present a valid Social Security number that is stolen or borrowed from another person, according to a report by the Westat research firm. The study is circulating among lobbyists backing a controversial Senate amendment to narrow and possibly weaken the system.

Web Basic Pilot is not designed to detect identity theft, a growing problem involving credit card, bank and other kinds of financial fraud. Experts warn that a new national work-authorization program could increase identity theft exponentially by expanding the market for stolen identities of workers.

"It is likely that employees will more frequently obtain counterfeit, borrowed or stolen documents" from people who have work authorization, the study said.

Businesses, unions and immigrant advocates all criticize the program -- perhaps understandably because the plan is designed to weed out illegal employment.

But computer experts also warn of the difficulties in devising any system of such size. Peter Neumann, principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory in Menlo Park, three weeks ago outlined to Congress the manifold potential pitfalls, calling the state-of-the-art in such large-scale systems very poor.

Speaking for the Association for Computing Machinery, a scientific and educational group, Neumann said lawmakers frequently have outsized expectations of technological fixes for social problems. He also cited a string of government software development fiascos that include "many highly visible projects that have been late, over budget, or indeed abandoned after many years and large expenditures."

Two former chiefs of federal immigration, Doris Meissner, a Democratic appointee, and James Ziglar, a Republican appointee, wrote recently that if the current Web Basic Pilot becomes mandatory, "the incentive for generating documents with real but stolen Social Security numbers will significantly increase. Document vendors will charge ever-heftier fees to those seeking papers, employers will hire them with impunity, and the availability of work for unauthorized workers will continue to be a powerful stimulus for illegal immigration, this time seriously compromising the integrity of Social Security numbers and records."

Others contend that building such a system, while difficult and costly, is possible.

"No one is thinking this bill is going to be 100 percent Star Wars-style efficiency, but if we could get 90 percent of the way there, that's a huge improvement," said Stewart Verdery, a former policy official at the Department of Homeland Security.

The cost, he predicted, will run into the billions of dollars. "My worry is that we've underfunded the unsexy part of immigration enforcement for a long time -- the IT systems, the identification documents -- and have pumped money into Border Patrol agents" and virtual fences, Verdery said. "But when you look at the system, those are the things that really, at the back end, make this work."

Although the system's accuracy has greatly improved from earlier non-Web versions begun more than a decade ago, 8 percent of potential new hires are still not instantly verified, according to a study of the pilot program. Seven percent of all verification attempts were unresolved for one reason or another, in part reflecting the 5 percent of the work force that is illegal.

Still, error rates on the work-authorized foreign born remain unacceptably high, the study found, with a nearly 11 percent error rate, where a legally authorized worker is rejected by mistake, often because of failure to update records.

The system is vulnerable to anyone who might pose as an employer to gain access, the study found. Computer scientist Neumann warned that it is a certainty that criminals would begin crafting "phishing" e-mails pretending to be from the Department of Homeland Security requesting worker information from unsuspecting employers.

Under any circumstance, the study said, the system would require heavy enforcement -- including raids and monitoring -- to make it work.

The idea of the Senate legislation is to legalize those here illegally now, so they would not have to commit fraud to work, and provide for future legal workers through an authorized guest-worker program. But if people do not choose to legalize, or if a guest worker program proves cumbersome or inadequate to meet demand, the incentive to find a way around the new verification system will remain.

As a way to get around the identity theft problem, the system would rely on the proposed new REAL ID secure driver's license -- aimed at verifying legal status -- that many states are already resisting. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff insists that secure driver's licenses -- which would allow employers to check an online digital photograph in addition to a Social Security number to verify workers -- are essential to thwart identity theft, but Congress may eliminate that requirement. REAL ID driver's licenses aren't scheduled to go into effect until December 2009. The department is now testing a system with 80 employers that checks digital photos on green cards and other work authorizations for legal immigrants, but doesn't cover citizens.

Mike Aitken, director of government affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management, said current driver's licenses pose a big loophole. A person could steal a valid Social Security number that matches a name, present the number to a state motor vehicle department, have their picture taken, and walk out with "a legitimate driver's license issued by the State of California that I can then use for employment. It's the impostor's photo on the driver's license, and it's a legal, legitimate driver's license, but I have stolen someone's identity."

And because immigration documents are being made more secure, he predicted it will become "more likely that U.S. citizens' identities are going to be stolen and fraudulently used for employment by those who don't want to come out of the shadows. It's going to happen. It will be worse than what we have now."

Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the system would give the government unprecedented power to deny people the right to work, but ultimately would prove ineffective.

"I think there is an erroneous concept post-9/11 in this country that somehow if we can just get your name and some data about you and get you on a card, we will have made our country more secure, or we'll stop immigrants from coming to this country, but none of that is really true," Sparapani said. "Those things are barriers, but they're easily overcome."

Critics contend that even tiny error rates can be greatly magnified when expanded to the entire workforce. About 60 million people change jobs each year alone. The Social Security Administration database has a 4.1 percent error rate because of name changes, data entry errors and other problems. If 149 million workers are checked through the system, that could yield more than 6 million errors, leading many legitimate workers into bureaucratic tangles and possibly overwhelming an already burdened Social Security Administration.

"As many people as change jobs in our country, even a 1 percent error rate would have a horrific impact on a lot of people," Verdery said.

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/25/MNGI0QL6VH1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

From Congressional Quarterly:Critics Take Aim at Heart of Immigration Bill

Critics Take Aim at Heart of Immigration Bill

By Michael Sandler, CQ Staff

Senators critical of immigration legislation that is expected back on the Senate floor this week will aim 20 or so amendments at core elements of the bill, hoping to substantially alter or kill it.

The amendments, evenly divided between the two parties, go to the heart of a bipartisan deal that was negotiated behind closed doors and under the supervision of two Cabinet secretaries.

A key procedural vote that would re-open the debate will likely take place June 22, said a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Reid said senators should prepare for votes over the weekend.

Leadership has yet to make public an official amendment list, but a draft list of at least 20 are circulating among staff and lobbyists.

Republicans and Democrats backing the legislation — a new version of the bill (S 1639) was introduced Monday — have said repeatedly that the basic tenets of the “grand bargain” must remain untouched for the group to hang together. Several amendments offered by both sides will test the influence of that group and determine whether the Senate can pass immigration legislation this year.

Democrats, aiming to appease constituency groups such as organized labor and Hispanics, intend to target the bill’s merit-based visa system that favors skills, education and occupations over family ties.

They also are looking to alter aspects of the bill that would allow businesses to employ temporary workers.

Green Cards

Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., has an amendment that would more than double the number of green cards issued annually to parents of U.S. citizens, increasing the cap from 40,000 to 90,000.

Dodd’s amendment also would increase the time frame that a parent of a U.S. citizen could stay in the country on a visa, from 30 days to 180 days.

An aide to Dodd said current law does not cap green cards for the parents of citizens and that the cap in the brokered deal “does not meet current demand.”

Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has introduced an amendment that would give family ties more weight in any point system that allows illegal immigrants to gain legal status.

Both Dodd’s and Menendez’s amendments could cause trouble with Republicans who have made ending so-called chain migration a priority.

Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has proposed an amendment that would ban employers from hiring guest workers for a year if they fail to post those positions with state employment agencies. The provision would require an employer to post the opening with such an agency 90 days before an application for a foreign worker is filed and for a period of one year after.

An amendment by Vermont independent Bernard Sanders would bar employers from hiring foreign workers if they have conducted mass layoffs. Visas for employment would not be approved until an employer has provided written certification, under penalty of perjury, to the secretary of Labor stating it has not had mass layoffs in the past 12 months. In the case where an employer has foreign workers at the time of a mass layoff, those visas would expire 60 days after notice has been sent.

Reid pulled a previous version of the immigration bill (S 1348) from the floor June 7 after nearly two weeks of debate.

Reid has made it clear that he wants Republicans and Democrats to agree on a finite list of amendments before he resumes consideration of immigration legislation.

President Bush paid a rare visit to the Senate on June 12 to try to revive the legislation.

Border Enforcement

With the legislation set for possible action later this week, Republicans, joined by a few Democrats, have amendments that would beef up border and enforcement provisions and would focus attention on the bill’s most contentious provision: allowing an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to stay indefinitely on new Z visas and ultimately become citizens.

Republican Norm Coleman of Minnesota will attempt a second time to offer an amendment allowing officials of federal, state or local government entities to question individuals about their immigration status if the officials have probable cause to believe the individuals lack legal status.

The amendment failed, 48-49, on May 24. A spokesman for Coleman said the amendment could undergo “some slight changes,” but that it would achieve the same purpose.

Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., has proposed an amendment that would prevent Z visa holders from earning green cards, while John Thune, R-S.D., would deny probationary benefits to the current illegal population until the bill’s series of border security and enforcement triggers are met.

John Ensign, R-Nev., has an amendment that would strike a provision in the bill allowing illegal immigrants to petition in the first six months after the bill’s passage to receive credit for Social Security taxes paid while using fraudulent identification to obtain work.

NY Times: Broad Effort to Resurrect Immigration Bill

Broad Effort to Resurrect Immigration Bill

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: June 16, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 15 — At 4:30 p.m. on June 7, the Roman Catholic Church defied the sponsors of a comprehensive immigration bill and urged the Senate not to move toward final passage of the measure without significant changes. 

A few hours later, after the Senate rejected his motion to end debate on the bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, pulled it from the Senate floor.

His action prompted advocates to rally behind the bill. Within 24 hours, the Catholic Church and many business, labor and Hispanic groups were urging the Senate to resurrect it.

They had all complained about various provisions of the measure. But when it appeared that the bill might be dying, they were flummoxed. Separately and together, they mobilized scores of lobbyists. They put pressure on the Senate and on Mr. Reid, in particular, to revive the bill.

“We were not happy with the bill,” said J. Kevin Appleby of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “But we did not want it to die.”

In public, Mr. Reid and the White House blamed each other for the apparent demise of the legislation, while conservative politicians and talk radio hosts criticized it as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Reid was inundated with telephone calls, letters, faxes and e-mail urging him to bring the bill back up. The pleas came from groups as diverse as the National Restaurant Association, the National Council of La Raza, the New England Apple Council and the business software company Oracle.

Farmers and ranchers from coast to coast told the Senate to get the job done.

“We are tired of the politics, we’re tired of the excuses, and we’re not going away until Congress reforms the broken immigration system,” said Maureen J. Torrey, who grows vegetables and raises dairy cows in western New York.

Unite Here, a union representing apparel, hotel and laundry workers, said the bill could be a boon to illegal immigrants who live in constant fear of being arrested and deported.

“We are the biggest union in the state of Nevada,” said Thomas G. Snyder, political director of Unite Here, which has nearly 60,000 members in Las Vegas casinos. “We have a long relationship with Harry Reid. He knows where we stand on immigration reform. We have been in constant contact with his office.”

Business trade associations weighed in on Monday, four days after the bill appeared to have collapsed.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business and the Business Roundtable told the Senate to go back to work.

The impasse could provide a “cooling-off period,” they said in a letter to all senators, urging them to pass a comprehensive immigration bill.

Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, said the efforts of business executives, combined with President Bush’s visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, “created an echo-chamber effect.”

The message resonated with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the chief Republican architect of the bill, who kept plugging for a deal.

Laura Foote Reiff, a lobbyist for companies that employ millions of immigrants in the hotel, construction and health care industries, fired off a letter to Senate leaders expressing “deep concern and distress with the Senate’s perceived inability to complete work on the bill.”

In opposing the effort to limit debate on June 7, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Senate needed more time to correct “significant flaws” in the bill: “the evisceration of the family preference system” and a legalization program that “may well be unworkable.”

The bishops cited those concerns when it urged the Senate to take up the bill.

“The issue of immigration is too important for our elected officials to abandon,” said Bishop Gerald R. Barnes of San Bernardino, Calif. “It cannot wait for several more years. Human beings are suffering and dying.”

Hispanic officials echoed that concern in urging Mr. Reid to revive the bill.

“Immigration is a life and death issue,” said Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the immigration task force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “Each day that goes by without action means more people will die in the desert.”

Mr. Bush did his part to whip up support for the bill by cajoling Republican senators and giving a speech on the issue. That put pressure on Mr. Reid to respond.

In addition, Mr. Reid was pummeled in some newspaper editorials and op-ed columns, which said it was shameful for him to let the bill die.

James P. Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said the news media criticism had “zero effect” on the majority leader. Many have questioned the strength of his commitment, but Mr. Reid insisted, “I have every desire to complete this legislation.”

On Friday, Mr. Reid said he would keep the Senate in session on weekends if necessary to complete work on the immigration bill this month.

Aides to Mr. McConnell, the Republican leader, said he had not promised to deliver any specific number of votes for efforts to shut off debate on the bill.

Only seven Republicans voted to end debate on June 7. Mr. Reid and the authors of the bill hope that more Republicans will support such a motion if they are allowed to offer amendments.

One amendment would add $4.4 billion to the bill to increase border security and enforcement of the immigration law. Others would expand a guest worker program for low-skill workers and provide more temporary visas and green cards for high-tech professionals sought by companies like Microsoft, Intel and Google.

One of the more contentious amendments, proposed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, would require illegal immigrants to return to their home countries before they could obtain even temporary legal status.