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Greg Sargent: If Immigration Reform Fails, It’s Because House GOP Wouldn’t Support Citizenship

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goodlatteThe immigration world is still waiting to see what House Republicans will do with an immigration bill on their side of the Hill, and Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) has already indicated that he wants to move House legislation in pieces.  Greg Sargent writes in the Washington Post today about the motives behind that strategy, in a post called “How conservatives will try to kill immigration reform”:

The ostensible purpose of this legislative strategy is to move slowly, to make it easier to eventually win over House conservatives and get them to back a path to citizenship. But it remains unclear how citizenship would figure into that piecemeal approach, or why moving reform pieces would make it any more likely that those opposed to citizenship would come around to it. Indeed, the strategy may be designed to scuttle reform, rather than make it more likely. The Post editorial board explains the real game plan:

That strategy gives conservatives a chance to say they were for immigration reform before they were against it. They may vote for bills that would tighten border security, provide a steady source of migrant farm workers and expand a program that companies may use to verify the immigration status of employees. Then, decrying “amnesty,” they can shoot down measures that would extend legal status and eventual citizenship to most of the undocumented.

As the editorial puts it, “opponents of reform are banking on derailing the measure with a strategy of delay and dismemberment.”

Last week Sargent wrote about how killing immigration reform would be a terrible, terrible mistake for Republicans—a point he reiterates today:

[Immigration] is all on House Republicans. They can hatch all the legislative trickery they want, but if reform fails, it will be for one simple reason: House Republicans were unable to embrace citizenship. Nothing short of citizenship will do. And by the way, there is no political outcome that could be worse for the GOP — and its efforts to begin repairing relations with Latinos — than having far right Republicans in the House kill immigration reform.

The Goodlattes, the Gowdys, and the Sessions of the legislative world should keep that in mind: screw immigration reform, and the GOP’s demographic future is doomed.