Dear Readers: 

We’re back from our newsletter hiatus and will be resuming our regular publishing schedule. We hope folks managed to get their immigration news fix. One way you can keep up in between issues of our newsletter is by visiting our many blogs. You can find links to them at http://www.visalaw.com/blogindex.html.  

In the meantime, there is a lot to report. Many of you are no doubt following the immigration legislative debate in Washington. Aside from writing about the legislative process, I’ve also been walking the halls of Congress to advocate on various aspects of immigration reform. I’ve participated now in several dozen meetings with congressional staffers including many working for members of both the House and Senate “Gangs of Eight”.  

While immigration lawyers have been trained by experience to be skeptical about the prospects for immigration reform, I’m growing more optimistic by the day that a deal can be reached. We’re not there yet, but I expect that within days we’ll see an actual bill introduced in the Senate and then action to mark up and debate the bill coming shortly after that. The House is actively working on its own bill, but the strategy on that side is not as clear. They could wait for the Senate to pass its own bill and then proceed with debating their own (some thought that they would simply take up the Senate bill, but that seems highly doubtful). Whether the bill goes through a markup in the House Judiciary Committee or goes right to the floor is an open question.  

The primary reason I am optimistic is because Republicans have been coming out of the woodwork in support of reform including a pathway to citizenship for the eleven million people currently without a legal status. Just this week, Tea Party leader and likely 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul joined the chorus of GOP members supporting reform. Likely presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have already come out strongly for reform and Speaker Boehner has been saying the right things lately as well. Even the Republican National Committee, which is not supposed to take policy positions, issued a report this week urging the party to support reform.

But reform can still be sunk and it is not always from the places you would think. There is a battle going on behind the scenes on a guest worker program and how it would operate. This issue sunk reform last time when the AFL-CIO took an anti-immigrant position and managed to get several Democrats to back away from the bill. While the GOP seems to now get that immigration reform is needed for the party to have a future, the AFL-CIO hasn’t figured that out yet. It’s hard to see them going out and recruiting Latino members when their main message is plainly unwelcoming.  

Time is running short for the Senate to get the details of the initial deal worked out. The bill negotiating is supposed to conclude next week and an actual bill will be introduced as soon as the Senate returns from the Easter break in early April.  

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In firm news, I was a guest speaker this week at an event sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The program, entitled “Getting Legal Immigration Right” was attended primarily by congressional staff members working on immigration legislation. A link to the event can be found at http://cei.org/events/2013/03/20/getting-legal-immigration-right .                              

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Readers are reminded that they are welcome to contact my law office if they would like to schedule a telephone or in person consultation with me or one of my colleagues. If you are interested, please call my office at 901-682-6455.

Regards,