A petition drive in the US Congress to push for a floor vote on the Shuler bill, a measure that would mandate universal use of E-Verify and crackdown on employer immigration law violators, has stalled indefinitely, as concerns grow about the cost of verifying the status of millions of workers, Reuters reports.  Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) said Republicans were unlikely to win enough signatures on the petition drive to force a vote on a bill which would require employers to verify the legal status of all their employees.  Emanuel said he and other members of Congress "took a step back" after the Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the proposed legislation would cost the federal Treasury over $30 billion in lost tax revenues.    

The 186 signatures currently on the petition fall considerably short of the 218 needed to force a House vote on legislation.  "We’ve got a little more work to do," House Republican Leader and petition supporter John Boehner of Ohio acknowledged last week.

A House Ways and Means subcommittee plans to hold a hearing later this month to further discuss the costs of the employee verification proposal and its compatibility with the Social Security system.  

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A new immigration measure, the Accountability in Immigrant Repatriation Act of 2008, was recently introduced in the Senate and House, Cox News Service reports.  The bill aims to address countries that refuse to allow back their naturalized emigrants upon US deportation; the issue has become more widespread since federal authorities stepped up immigration enforcement efforts.   

The bill, aimed to be a punitive measure against offending countries, would require the Department of Homeland Security to report to Congress every 90 days on the countries that refuse repatriation.  Those nations would automatically be denied all immigrant visas until they took their citizens back.  The bill also gives the option of denying certain types of foreign aid to the countries.  

As of February, at least eight countries—Vietnam, Jamaica, China, India, Ethiopia, Laos, Eritrea and Iran—were refusing to take back an estimated 139,000 undocumented immigrants, 18,000 of them convicted felons, slated for deportation from the US, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The nations site different reasons for why they refuse to take back undocumented immigrants.  Some experts believe that some individuals could cause political unrest in their home country.  Others contend that they shouldn’t have to take care of citizens who became criminals in the US .  

The proposed bill also seeks to reform existing incarceration laws against undocumented immigrants.  Once they serve their sentence in the US, convicted felons who are unauthorized to be in the US can be held for only 180 additional days, due to a 2001 Supreme Court decision.  After this, they are released in the general population.  "There is an enormous problem of public safety, which is slightly under the radar screen," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill’s co-sponsor.