A day after President Obama renewed his pledge to reform the nation’s immigration system and blamed Republicans for blocking past efforts, Senate Democrats on Wednesday reintroduced a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for people who arrived here illegally as children. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act failed to garner the 60 votes needed for passage when the Democratic-controlled Senate took up the measure last year. It was defeated 55-41, with the help of five moderate Democrats whose support would have provided the votes needed to pass the bill.
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Still, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he plans to keep pressure on Republicans to support the proposal this time, not his own Democrats.
“Let’s not focus on those five Democrats,” Reid said. “We’ll work with them, of course. What we need to focus on is the Republicans.”
Reid’s statement echoed Obama, who on Tuesday delivered a major address on immigration reform, in which he accused the GOP of standing in the way of immigration reform despite his efforts to beef up security along the nation’s southern border.
“They’ll never be satisfied,” Obama said in his speech. “Maybe they’ll say we need a moat. Or alligators in the moat.”
Reid continued the drumbeat Wednesday, praising the DREAM Act and signaling that the Senate would take up essentially the same bill, though he said he did not know when the vote would take place.
The measure would give illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens if they arrived in the United States as children and completed two years of college or military service.
Democrats say the bill would end the legal limbo for many young and talented illegal immigrants who say they can’t join the military or certain professions because they are not legally in the country.
“This is a matter about justice,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said. “We should not punish children for the action of parents.”
But Republicans in both chambers want Congress to first address problems with security along the U.S.-Mexican border so fewer people can gain illegal entry into the United States.
“You need comprehensive immigration reform,” Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., told The Washington Examiner. “To even do that without looking at a comprehensive plan wouldn’t be doable. I would never support that.”
With a smaller majority and looming elections for 23 vulnerable Senate Democrats, many of them from swing states, it’s unlikely the Senate will pass the bill, even with Democrats still in control.
But for Obama and the Democrats, it is a political imperative for them to demonstrate they are pushing the legislation, which has become a major focus of Hispanic voters whose support the party needs to win races in 2012.
Last month, Senate Democrats sent a letter to Obama, asking him to stop deporting people who came to the United States as children and who would have been able to remain if the DREAM Act were law.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told The Examiner earlier this year that the House would not take up the DREAM Act, which passed in the chamber under Democratic control last year.
