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Bush urges work on immigration reform

President Bush, center, speaks Tuesday flanked by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., right, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., after a meeting on immigration reform. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Frank James and Jeff Zeleny Chicago Tribune
President Bush, center, speaks Tuesday flanked by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., right, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., after a meeting on immigration reform. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

WASHINGTON – President Bush prodded Congress on Tuesday to approve immigration reform this year, assuring senators that he supports comprehensive legislation that would include a guest worker program as well as improved enforcement.

But whether the president’s support for the kind of immigration reform that stalled in the Senate two weeks ago will be enough to win congressional approval remained a major question as those who oppose an amnesty for illegal immigrants showed no signs of relenting.

“It’s important that we reform a system that is not working,” said Bush, surrounded in the White House Cabinet Room by a bipartisan group of senators, including those who negotiated a Senate immigration compromise that then was stalled within 24 hours.

“It’s important that we uphold the values of the United States of America,” Bush said. “It’s important that we treat people with dignity. And I strongly believe that we have a chance to get an immigration bill that is comprehensive in nature to my desk before the end of this year.”

Lawmakers from both parties left the meeting noticeably upbeat, a marked difference from the time just before their spring recess when many were crestfallen after the Senate’s legislation bogged down following disagreement between the Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders on how to proceed on the bill.

“I’m not in the habit of patting the president on the back, but I have to say that this was a really good, good meeting,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“The rest of it, I think, is up to Sen. (Bill) Frist and I,” he said. “We have to work out a way to handle the procedural quagmire that the Senate is. We’re going to try to do that.”

Frist, the Senate majority leader from Tennessee, nodded his head in agreement, blaming previous delays in the legislation “on procedural reason, not on policy, not on substance.”

Absent, though, were members of the Senate who disagree with key provisions of the legislation, particularly giving most of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.

And House Republicans were missing too. In December, the House passed legislation without any path to legalization of immigrants already in the United States. That bill, focusing on enforcement, would make illegal immigrants felons, boost penalties for hiring undocumented workers and require the building of a 700-mile fence along the United States’ southern border with Mexico.