As the Senate prepares to start working on an immigration bill that will pave the way for millions of immigrants to obtain citizenship as well as change the country's entire immigration system President Barack Obama gave a speech imploring lawmakers to approve the bill, according to CBS News.
"This week, the Senate will consider a common-sense, bipartisan bill that is the best chance we've had in years to fix our broken immigration system," President Obama said. "To truly deal with this issue Congress needs to act. And that moment is now."
President Obama has avoided speaking about the immigration bill for the last couple of months, seemingly afraid that if he supported it too vigorously the bill would lose the much needed support from a few conservatives, reports Agence France-Presse.
Despite the bill being written by a bipartisan group over the period of many months it will be introduced to a Senate that is so divided it has had a hard time passing anything. The bill will likely need 60 votes in order to pass as had become standard in the Senate with Republican opponents threatening a filibuster. President Obama urged that the Senate put aside pettiness in order to get the immigration bill passed by the end of the summer, according to CBS News.
"There's no good reason to play procedural games or engage in obstruction just to block the best chance we've had in years to address this problem in a way that's fair to middle-class families, to business owners, to legal immigrants," President Obama said. "That's not who we are. We owe it to America to do better. We owe it to the dreamers to do better. We owe it to the young people."
Republicans who oppose the bill say that it does not address the issue of border security properly; arguing that security under the bill would be too weak or that the changes the bill makes would be almost impossible to implement, according to CBS News.
"We have more boots on the ground along our southern border than at any time in our history," President Obama said addressing the concerns over border security. "And in part by using technology more effectively, illegal crossings are near their lowest level in decades. Having put border security in place, having refocused on those who could do our communities harm, we also, then, took up the cause of the young DREAMers...who are brought to this country as children."
Even some of the Senators who helped draft the bill have argued that it needs to be significantly altered while under debate in the Senate. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has said that he will introduce an amendment that mandates potential citizens to be fluent in English before they can receive a green card; the current form of the bill only requires that potential citizens be taking classes to learn English, according to the Washington Post.
"Since the bill was introduced two months ago, the open and transparent process it has undergone has elicited constructive criticisms to improve it," Rubio said. "This is one of the bill's shortcomings that came to light, which we can now fix."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said that the immigration bill will need to undergo "major changes" if it is to become a law, according to CBS News.
"This bill has some serious flaws," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "And we need to be serious about fixing them. That's what the next few weeks are about: They're about giving the entire Senate, and indeed, the entire country, an opportunity to weigh in on this debate, to make their voices heard, and try to improve our immigration policy."
