Immigrant rights supporters claimed their first major victory since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks after a bipartisan group of senators approved legislation that would give millions of illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship.
"It's a big day for us. We may not have a lot of big days, but this is a big day," Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant group, said after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a package of immigration and border security measures on Monday.
Restaurant owners, agricultural groups, Democrats and others who had been pushing for a way for illegal immigrants to earn legal permanent residency -- the first step to citizenship -- also claimed victory.
PHOTO: AP
There was no immediate reaction from the White House, and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said he hoped President George W. Bush, who advocates a so-called guest worker program, would participate in efforts to fashion consensus legislation.
The next step is the full Senate, where Majority Leader Bill Frist is negotiating with other senators on how to handle the committee's bill and his own proposal, which focuses more on punishing employers who hire undocumented workers.
"The situation along our Southern borders now ranks as a national security challenge, second only to the war on terror," Frist said on Monday. "Every day thousands of people violate our frontiers."
Frist said the Senate will begin a debate on immigration later this week with the aim of passing a bill by April 7.
Senator John McCain, an architect of the bill approved by the Judiciary Committee, said the turnouts in the hundreds of thousands -- particularly among Hispanics -- at recent rallies in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington helped galvanize support for the bill.
In general, the Judiciary Committee's bill is designed to bolster enforcement of US borders, regulate the flow into the country of guest workers and determine the legal future of the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the US illegally.
The bill would double the Border Patrol and authorizes a "virtual wall" of unmanned vehicles, cameras and sensors to monitor the US-Mexico border. It also allows more visas for nurses and agriculture workers, and shelters humanitarian organizations from prosecution if they provide non-emergency assistance to illegal residents.
The most contentious provision would permit illegal aliens currently in the country to apply for citizenship without first having to return home, a process that would take at least six years or more. They would have to pay a fine, learn English, study US civics, demonstrate they had paid their taxes and take their place behind other applicants for citizenship, according to aides to Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in drafting the legislation.
Kennedy credited the "faith community" for building support for a guest worker program.
The Judiciary Committee also approved a five-year plan to provide visas for about 1.5 million agriculture workers and allow them to eventually seek legal residency.
Recent polls show that about six in 10 Americans oppose letting illegal immigrants remain in the country and apply for citizenship and three of every four do not believe the government is doing enough to stem the continuing tide of new arrivals.
"For years, the government has turned a blind eye to illegal aliens who break into this country," said Representative. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican.
Tancredo helped lead the fight for a bill the House passed last December that would define illegal immigrants as felons, build fences across a third of the US-Mexican border and enlist local police and the military to help patrol it.
Any bill produced by the Senate would have to be reconciled with the House measure.
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