The US Senate on Wednesday approved a key provision on tightening border security of a landmark immigration reform bill, setting up a vote on final passage of the measure later this week.
If the overall bipartisan legislation passes the chamber as expected as early as Thursday, it would move to the Republican-led House of Representatives, where its fate is less certain.
The massive bill — backed by President Barack Obama and considerend the most comprehensive immigration reform effort in a generation — has been months in the making.
But in recent weeks, two Republicans, Senators Bob Corker and John Hoeven, scrambled to forge a compromise “Border Surge” amendment in a bid to appease concerns within their party that the bill sets 11 million undocumented workers on a 13-year path to citizenship before the border is made entirely secure.
The Corker-Hoeven measure — costing some $46 billion over 10 years — would bring $4.5 billion in muscular new security measures to the southern US border, including 20,000 additional agents, a total of 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) of secure fencing and an expansion of drone surveillance.
It would also require that an electronic employment verification system known as “e-verify” and comprehensive, biometric entry-exit tracking be in place before illegal immigrants could obtain green cards.
“Americans want immigration reform but they want border security first, and that’s exactly what this amendment does,” Hoeven said on the Senate floor moments before the measure was agreed to by a vote of 69 to 29, with support from 12 Republicans.
Republican critics have insisted the bill must prevent future waves of illegal immigration by making the US-Mexico border virtually impenetrable.
Several conservatives have slammed the high cost, and said legislative loopholes would allow progress on the pathway to citizenship before full operational border security is in place.
“This bill has $48 billion thrown up against the wall to buy the vote to say we are going to have a secure border, when in fact we will not,” Senator Tom Coburn said this week.
But Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio, perhaps the most high-profile sponsor of the bill and a prospective Republican presidential candidate in 2016, insisted critics were wrong to think immigrants would enjoy a flood of federal benefits.
Rubio said they would be “ineligible for welfare, food stamps and Obamacare,” the national health care law, while awaiting green cards, and that permanent status would not be granted to anyone until the border security measures are in place.
US Senate OKs border security part of immigration bill
