Obama Won’t Offer Immigration Bill — Yet
President Barack Obama will flesh out his 2011 immigration reform blueprint Tuesday in Nevada, but he will not release a bill of his own.
Though the White House has been drafting legislative language for four years, administration officials said Monday that the president would not put forward a plan with that much specificity at this point.
Obama was heartened by the group of eight senators that announced Monday that it had crafted a bipartisan framework that includes a path to citizenship, the administration officials said.
That Senate framework includes a key, and potentially controversial, compromise — requiring new enforcement measures to be implemented before any undocumented immigrants can be issued permanent residency or citizenship.
The White House has not signed on to that piece even though it sees the overall package as broadly consistent with the president’s own plan.
The president believes that it needs to be clear from the outset that illegal immigrants will have a path to citizenship so people aren’t hanging in limbo, one official said.
The White House, meanwhile, has its own immigration legislative language — compiled since 2009 through various other aborted negotiations — but it does not see a need to offer that up at this point.
Obama is going on the stump to push for immigration because his advisers feel that their successes in recent years have come when the president has taken his case to the public. And officials think the president’s post-election push already helped spur the group of senators to come to an accord.