Doubts Emerge on Senate’s ‘Gang of Eight’ Immigration Bill

Politics

The Senate is scheduled to begin debate next week on the so-called “Gang of Eight” bipartisan proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, and New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer predicted Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that the bill would pass by July 4 with as many as 70 votes. However, House Speaker John Boehner has said the GOP majority in the House won’t be “steamrolled” by the Democrat-led Senate, and doubts about the legislation are beginning to be heard.

Liberals have begun to criticize key elements of the proposal, Mickey Kaus of the Daily Caller observes, citing a lengthy critique by John B. Judis of the New Republic. The Gang of Eight plan “denies health insurance coverage to the eleven million undocumented workers,” Judis wrote last week. “Only after immigrants become permanent residents, which in the case of the eleven million undocumented will take a minimum of ten years and as long as 15 years, will they become eligible for Obamacare.” Judis explained that the Obama administration is trapped by the political calculus that was necessary to pass its health-insurance program. “[F]acing charges from Republicans that the health care bill secretly funded ‘illegal immigrants,’ [the White House] urged Senate Democrats to bar the undocumented from coverage. The administration, fearful of political trouble, reflexively carried this over to its own immigration-reform proposals.”

Meanwhile, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a key GOP member of the Gang of Eight, has raised concerns about border security that could scuttle the entire bill. Rubio says the existing legislation grants the administration too much leeway in enforcement. Rubio “is shopping around a proposal to have Congress — not the Department of Homeland Security — write the border control strategy that would be a prerequisite for most of the other elements of reform,” Politico reports. “Rubio wants lawmakers to craft the plan at the outset, rather than leave the details up to the Obama administration.” Democrats oppose changes to the bill, but if Rubio pulls his support, the measure may not even have enough votes to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

Attempts to create the appearance of broad support for the controversial legislation are also coming under intense scrutiny. Matthew Boyle reported Sunday at Breitbart.com that the “Evangelical Immigration Table,” which is running an advertising campaign in support of the reform bill, is in fact a front group controlled by the liberal National Immigration Forum and funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros through his Open Society Institute:

In 2009, OSI donated $257,152 to NIF aimed at “implementing immigration reform campaign through communications, policy, and field organizing.”
Also in 2009, OSI donated another $1.5 million to “allow” NIF to “manage and lead Four Pillars Campaign for comprehensive immigration reform, and sustain core policy work supporting and leading policy efforts.”
A year later, in 2010, Soros’s OSI gave NIF another $1.5 million over two separate grants both intended for “general operating support.”
NIF has also received $1 million total from the leftist Ford Foundation, spread over two separate half-million-dollar grants in 2009 and 2011. Those grants were both intended for advocacy in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.
Jim Wallis, the president and CEO of Sojourners, a leading force in the Evangelical Immigration Table group, has admitted to accepting funding from Soros as well.
World magazine writer Marvin Olasky laid out in a 2010 article how Wallis and his organization, Sojourners, had received $325,000 from Soros groups over three grants from 2004, 2006 and 2007. According to OSI’s 2007 990 form filed with the IRS, available publicly through the Foundation Center, the 2007 money-a total of $100,000-was for Wallis’s Sojourners “to support the Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Campaign.”

READ MORE: