Immigration Reform Is Likely Dead on Arrival in House, Dead Until 2009

Regardless of what convoluted piece of immigration legislation may be molded this week by the U.S. Senate, comprehensive immigration reform in the 110th Congress is reportedly dead on arrival in the House of Representatives.

Per CNN last month, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the White House that she's not going to bring the issue to the floor unless the president can deliver at least 70 Republican votes."

The House Republican Conference met yesterday, June 26, and voted 114 to 23 to reject the Senate immigration reform bill under debate now, even before the House has received it. And as they've repeatedly demonstrated, House Republicans are a far more conservative body than their Senate counterparts.

Scraping up 70 House Republicans genuinely interested in debating immigration is improbable. Outside of obsessing about how high, wide, thick and tricked-out a wall must be to keep Mexicans out of the U.S., the majority of House Republicans have little interest in reforming immigration laws to correct injustices and reflect economic reality.

And maybe that's a good thing.

As Republican senator after senator tries to tack-on amendments to derail meaningful, fair reform, a once balanced immigration reform bill has increasingly morphed into a mean-spirited, xenophobic compendium of fines, punishments and impossibly cruel requirements.

As I write these words (with an eye on C-SPAN), a frustrated Sen. Ted Kennedy, himself the descendant of Irish immigrants, is passionately reciting the words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Rather than live those sacred words, most Congressional Republicans apparently would prefer to use illegal immigrants to pick their produce, clean their houses, mow their lawns, bus their restaurant tables, make their hotel beds, tend their golf courses, build their homes... and then mandate that they exist as a frightened class of invisible, sub-humans with no needs and no families.

I honestly can't imagine greater, greedier hypocrisy.

Vote Democratic in 2008, and let's pass realistic immigration reform in 2009 for flesh-and-blood human beings and their families.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

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Illegal Immigration Explained - Profits & Poverty, Social Security & Starvation
Pros & Cons of the Immigration Reform Act of 2007
Senate Resumes Immigration Discussion (Currrent Political Events)