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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Public and GOP Outcry as Sensenbrenner inserts Guest Worker amesty into bill! WASHINGTON - The last-minute addition of language that expresses congressional support for a guest worker program into the immigration bill headed for the House floor Thursday has a group of Republican members up in arms. Topics, amnesty, guest worker program, shamnesty, temporary worker,betrayal, illegal immigration, immigrants, laws, congress, GOP 12/14/2005 BY DENA BUNISThe Orange County Register For months, House GOP leaders have said they plan to go to the floor with an immigration bill that deals with border security and doesn't include the kind of temporary guest worker program that many Senate Republicans and the White House have been calling for. But early Wednesday, House staffers learned that a one-paragraph section discussing the need for foreign workers to help the U.S. economy was being added to the bill. It was being included as part of a wide-ranging amendment by the bill's author, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. (He passed the REAL ID ACT) "The assurances that we had on this bill was that it would address our border security concerns," said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., who made an impassioned statement Wednesday at a meeting of Republican members calling for the leaders to remove the language before the bill hits the floor. "Now the day before the vote we learn that there's a Trojan horse that's being attached by way of a guest worker program that we feel will lead to an amnesty." For months, House GOP leaders have said they plan to go to the floor with an immigration bill that deals with border security and doesn't include the kind of temporary guest worker program that many Senate Republicans and the White House have been calling for. But early Wednesday, House staffers learned that a one-paragraph section discussing the need for foreign workers to help the U.S. economy was being added to the bill. It was being included as part of a wide-ranging amendment by the bill's author, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. "The assurances that we had on this bill was that it would address our border security concerns," said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., who made an impassioned statement Wednesday at a meeting of Republican members calling for the leaders to remove the language before the bill hits the floor. "Now the day before the vote we learn that there's a Trojan horse that's being attached by way of a guest worker program that we feel will lead to an amnesty." The House Rules Committee, which decides what goes to the floor for debate, was meeting into the night Wednesday debating the language Royce and other GOP members object to as well as deciding which of 137 proposed amendments to the bill will make it to the House floor. Overall, the bill would tighten border security, create a program for employers to verify whether the workers they are hiring are legally entitled to work here, and make it easier for federal officials to deport illegal immigrants. There has long been a split among Republicans over whether immigration reform should concentrate just on enforcement or also include a program to deal with the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living and working in the United States. Royce said this new language was put into Sensenbrenner's amendment "because Jeff Flake and others who are enthusiasts for an open border position have tried to negotiate this into the final bill through subterfuge." A spokesman for Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he wanted to wait and see whether the Rules Committee left his language in the bill before responding to Royce. When Sensenbrenner's bill was debated at the Judiciary Committee last week, several Democrats attempted to get a guest worker program included in it. At the time, Sensenbrenner said he was sympathetic to the need for such a program but that now was not the time to include it because there was no consensus about what such a program should entail. It was not clear Wednesday what made him agree to the new language. Sensenbrenner could not be reached. The language being proposed for the bill would not on its own create a guest worker program. But its inclusion would have symbolic and political strategic value for those seeking such a program. Whatever happens in the House, the bill up for consideration Thursday is not likely to become law. The Senate is slated to take up immigration reform in February. A handful of reform proposals have been introduced, but two major bills - one by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and another by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., are the major ones. Most of the bills being considered include both enforcement and guest worker measures. If the House bill arrives at the Senate with a sense of support for some kind of guest worker program, it makes it more likely that some kind of temporary employee measure will make it in the final package. "That's the direction the process is headed in," said Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that supports comprehensive reform. (They support Amnesty)
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