Talks begin on immigration overhaul
He backs Cotton plan to reapportion green cards, scrap diversity lottery
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (center) of Arkansas joins Stephen Miller (left), President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, and Vice President Mike Pence at a meeting on immigration Thursday at the White House with Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Cotton is co-sponsoring a bill backed by Trump that would limit legal immigration.
WASHINGTON — With the deadline clock ticking, President Donald Trump on Thursday huddled with Republican lawmakers and invited a bipartisan group to the White House next week to try to work out a deal on immigration.
Lawmakers have been trying to come up with a plan Trump will agree to that extends legal status for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
Trump announced in September that he would be ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that had protected them from deportation, but gave Congress until March to come up with a legislative fix. Democrats want the fix to be part of a spending pact that must pass by Jan. 19 to keep the government running.
“We’re all working in an effort to develop an immigration reform plan that will serve the interests of the American workers and the American families and safety,” Trump said at the top of Thursday’s meeting, which was attended by a handful of Republican senators, including John Cornyn of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
He later tweeted: “Thank you to the great Republican Senators who showed up to our mtg on immigration reform. We must BUILD THE WALL, stop illegal immigration, end chain migration & cancel the visa lottery. The current system is unsafe & unfair to the great people of our country — time for change!”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president is inviting a bipartisan group of senators to the White House next week “to discuss the next steps on responsible immigration reform and to continue that discussion.”
“We’d like to have a deal where we have [the deferred-action program] as well as those priorities and principles that we laid out last year met,” she said.
Republicans and Democrats are at odds at how best to extend protections for the young people, often called “Dreamers” based on proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act.
Democrats have been pushing for a standalone bill or for deportation protections to be included as part of other must-pass legislation. But Republicans have insisted that help for the young immigrants must come with measures to bolster border security.
Trump’s White House last year released a lengthy list of dozens of immigration priorities that officials said the president would demand in exchange for signing the deferred-action legislation.
The list included money to build Trump’s promised southern border wall and money for more border patrol and other immigration enforcement agents, as well as a complete overhaul of the legal immigration system. That would include limiting what critics call “chain migration,” in which legal immigrants are able to sponsor extended family members to come to the U.S.
Trump said during the meeting Thursday that any deal he signs will need to include funding for his border wall, more money for immigration enforcement, an overhaul of the family-based immigration system and an end to the diversity visa lottery.
“Our current immigration system fails Americans. Chain migration is a total disaster which threatens our security and our economy and provides a gateway for terrorism,” he said.
Cotton and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., are sponsoring legislation, backed by Trump, that would limit legal immigration.
Among other things, the bill would end the diversity lottery, which awards 50,000 green cards to applicants from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.
Trump and Cotton say green cards instead should go to highly skilled immigrants.
“The lottery system is a disaster. Tom and I talk about it all the time,” Trump told reporters, gesturing toward Cotton as he spoke.
Cotton said he hopes Democrats will work with Republicans to pass legislation that improves the existing immigration system.
Trump said he’s hopeful that will happen, telling Cotton, “I think we’ve got a good shot. I really do.”