Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’ll consider a second try at passing immigration reform in the Senate this year if the House approves a bill.
The Kentucky Republican has gained enthusiasm for considering a bill after panning another vote weeks ago. The Senate rejected four immigration reform bills earlier this year.
“If the House were to pass a bill that the president said he would sign, I would consider it,” he said in an interview with “Behind Closed Doors,” a Washington Examiner podcast. “The reason I’m not willing to go far beyond consideration is the experience we had back in February of spending a week on it and we couldn’t come up with anything that would get 60 votes.”
The House could consider as early as next week a pair of immigration reform bills. Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is writing one of the measures and he said it will include the four immigration reform requirements put forward by the Trump administration that include a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, an end to the visa lottery system, border security funding, and reduced chain migration.
McConnell has long argued that the Senate should take up an immigration reform bill President Trump supports.
“I can’t see us going back to immigration this year unless there was some proposal that the president actually was OK with and said he was willing to sign,” McConnell said last week on Fox News.
Ryan may also add language to end the separation of illegal immigrant parents and children that has increased recently.
