Cornyn, Hurd remain uncertain about immigration law changes
President Donald Trump may be on hisway out, but that doesn’t mean Congress is any closer to passing comprehensive immigration reform, U.S. Rep. Will Hurd said Thursday.
“Comprehensive immigration reform is not going to work,” the retiring Republican congressman from San Antonio said.
In fact, Hurd said, he fears Congress is in an even worse spot to pass immigration reform based on the election results.
Hurd said there are too many different pieces of immigration reform that produce too many differing coalitions, which makes it nearly impossible to pass a more comprehensive bill. Even with a new leader in the White House,
Hurd said, there are still significant hurdles to even passing protections for socalled Dreamers. Those are people brought to the U.S. as children by parents who entered the nation illegally and whom President Barack Obama tried to protect from deportation with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Polls consistently show most Americans support protecting Dreamers, yet legislation on the issue has gone nowhere.
Under current laws, the Dreamers continue to reapply for two-year permits that allow them to work and drive without fear of deportation but offer no long-term security.
“Let’s not get too excited about Joe Biden coming in,” Hurd said. “Because Barack Obama had amajority in the Senate and couldn’t get the Dream Act done.”
Hurd’s comments came during a daylong virtual summit organized by the American Business Immigration Coalition.
Also speaking at the conference was U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas who just won re-election last month. Cornyn, like Hurd, said the nation desperately needs to fix its “outdated” and “inefficient” immigration system.
He said there is a lot of agreement in the Senate that the system has to be improved, but Congress has yet to pass any major changes to the laws.
“The fact that we have not yet been successful in passing meaningful reforms of our broken immigration system is one ofmy biggest frustrations,” Cornyn said.
He said he hopes there is enough will to tackle the issue next year and said the best starting point would be addressing DACA to bring more certainty for the young people in the program. But he used his comments to jab at Obama for enacting by executive order instead of going through Congress.
Cornyn said he took part in White House meetings where he and others warned Obama his actions would lead to more polarization, litigation and a lot of uncertainty for those young immigrants.
More than 100,000 Texans are enrolled in the DACA program, which Trump closed and then partially reinstated.
Going forward, Cornyn acknowledged that there is still uncertainty in what kind of legislation will come out of the Senate because of the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia next month. It is unclear who will be leading the committees dealing with immigration reform until those elections end.
If anything is going to get done, Hurd, whose 23rd Congressional District includes more than 800 miles of the Texas-Mexico border, said it’s going to be a piecemeal approach. Maybe one bill addresses policies regarding migrant workers in the agriculture industry, while another deals with Dreamers, while another takes on visa programs for high-tech workers.
Hurd said he is not trying to be a downer and is usually a pretty optimistic guy.
“But we’ve got to be real,” he said.
Hurd said there is hope in that the border security component of immigration reform looks very different to him than it did years ago. While Trump never built the coast-to-coast border wall he touted in his 2016 campaign for the White House, Hurd said there has been progress on so-called smart wall technology. He pointed to dozens of surveillance towers along the border that are now better able to monitor border crossings. The U.S. has built at least 65 of those towers, with an additional 200 ordered and on their way.
Hurd, 43, did not seek reelection this year. Republican Tony Gonzales won the congressional seat in November over Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones. Gonzales takes office in January.