The US Senate on Thursday passed a sweeping bipartisan immigration reform bill . Despite contention on both sides, the largest immigration overhaul in a generation was passed by a vote of 68 to 32.
The measure is 1,200 pages long and carries a $50 billion price tag. If passed, it will double the number of US Border Patrol agents along the southern border and would also require the construction of 700 miles of fencing there.
But while the Senate approved of the immigration reform bill, it faces a tougher time in the Republican-controlled House , where several Representatives have expressed criticism of it.
The last immigration reform to take place in the United States was the 1986 amnesty bill, which legalized more than three million immigrants. It was passed under President Ronald Reagan.
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) praised the bill on the Senate floor, saying that the “historic legislation recognizes that today’s immigrants came for the right reason, the same reason as the generations before them … the right to live in a land that’s free.”
But not everyone appeared to think the immigration reform bill was good. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) spoke out against the bill on the Senate floor . He argued that the bill would not do enough to increase interior immigration enforcement.
While the so-called Gang of Eight who developed the bill in the Senate were hoping to get 70 our of 100 senators to vote for it, they fell two short of the goal. The group was hoping to send a strong message of bipartisanship to the House.
But while the goal wasn’t quite met, it was still impressive, as 14 Republican senators voted alongside the entire Democratic caucus in support of the immigration reform bill. But House members are currently working on their own version of an immigration reform bill. They have said that they do not want unauthorized immigrants to be given any kind of temporary status until border security measures are fully implemented.
Republican Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam even went so far on Thursday to call the Senate’s immigration bill a “pipe dream” that has no chance of passing in the House of Representatives.
Do you think the Senate’s immigration reform bill should pass in the House as well?
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