Menu for House GOP: Immigration à la carte

By SEUNG MIN KIM | 7/29/13 11:25 PM EDT
POLITICO

The House is still fumbling around on how its members will tackle immigration reform.

But two key House committees have at least laid out a menu of some options for the full chamber to consider when it begins voting on immigration bills this fall. Reflecting GOP wishes for a piecemeal strategy, each bill passed one at a time and, except for one, no Democrats voted in favor of them.

The collection of bills touches on a wide array of immigration laws, from enforcement to agriculture, E-Verify to the high-skilled sector except the big elephant in the room: What’s the House going to do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants?

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to those five bills, which passed when most of the focus was on the Senate Gang of Eight and its rewrite of immigration laws.

Border security

Of the five immigration bills that have cleared House committees, the border security legislation has the best chance of gaining broad bipartisan support.

The Border Security Results Act calls on the Department of Homeland Security to create a plan to make sure that within five years, at least 90 percent of all illegal border crossings along the southwestern U.S. border are apprehended. The bill also lays out several ways to measure how well security is improving along the border — such as the amount of illicit drugs seized by Border Patrol agents.

It’s a far cry from the border security plan in the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill, the final version of which would cost roughly $46 billion to double the amount of Border Patrol agents, direct the completion of the southwestern border fence and require other security measures. That plan, from Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota, doesn’t have many fans in the House.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/house-gop-immigration-reform-94892.html#ixzz2aYUc14ml

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