Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama rolls into Las Vegas on Tuesday, ready to double down on immigration reform.
After failing to press
the issue during his first four years in office, he has made it a top
legislative priority of his second term.
While the president will
highlight immigration proposals in a speech at 2:55 p.m. ET, senior
administration officials say, he will not introduce new legislation, at
least not now.
Obama came under
criticism from Latino activists for failing to deliver on a 2008
campaign promise to make immigration reform a priority of his first
term.
Last year, as Obama's
re-election campaign heated up, his administration announced a halt to
deportations of some young undocumented immigrants in a move that
delighted the Latino community.
Exit polls in November
indicated that Latino voters gave overwhelming support to Obama over GOP
challenger Mitt Romney, who had advocated a policy that amounted to
forcing undocumented immigrants to deport themselves.
While in Nevada, Obama
will press for quick action on immigration reform and share more details
about his immigration proposal, which includes a path to citizenship
for 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Senate lays out blueprint
Obama heads west a day after a bipartisan group of eight senators laid out their blueprint for immigration reform.
The White House may consider introducing its own legislation should the Senate plan fall apart, administration officials said.
Under the compromise
plan by the senators, known as the "gang of eight," millions of
undocumented immigrants would get immediate but provisional status to
live and work in the United States.
The Democratic sources
say the president will praise the Senate for the bipartisan blueprint
outlined Monday, while stressing that the issue must not get bogged down
in the kind of political fights that derailed past bipartisan policy
battles. According to sources, he will say there have been bipartisan
"gangs" before, and they don't always lead to results.
The senators' outline
also called for strengthening border controls, improved monitoring of
visitors and cracking down on hiring undocumented workers.
Only after those steps
occurred could the undocumented immigrants already in the country begin
the process of getting permanent residence -- green cards -- as a step
toward citizenship, the senators said at a news conference.
Conservatives split on reform
Florida Sen. Marco
Rubio, a tea party-backed conservative considered a rising star in the
Republican Party, said the goal was to create a "modern immigration
system" that treated everyone fairly, both the undocumented and those
waiting to come to America legally.
"None of this is
possible if we don't address the reality there are 11 million people in
this country who are undocumented," Rubio said.
However, another tea
party-backed Republican, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, objected to the
framework by his colleagues, saying the guidelines "contemplate a policy
that will grant special benefits to undocumented immigrants based on
their unlawful presence in the country."
Other conservatives
immediately voiced their opposition to what they called amnesty, a code
word on the political right for providing undocumented immigrants a path
to legal status.
"When you legalize those
who are in the country illegally, it costs taxpayers millions of
dollars, costs American workers thousands of jobs and encourages more
illegal immigration," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who serves on the
immigration subcommittee in the House. "By granting amnesty, the Senate
proposal actually compounds the problem by encouraging more illegal
immigration."
A litany of left-leaning
advocacy groups spoke out on the senators' plan, praising it as a good
first step but cautioning against harming the rights of workers.
"The people of this
country are ready for us to be one country again without second-class
people being mistreated simply because they lack paper, even though they
are already contributing to our economy and our tax system," NAACP
President Ben Jealous said.
Democratic senators
backing the plan include Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of
Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado.
On the Republican side were Rubio, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona.
Durbin said Tuesday that immigration reform must have bipartisan support to work, so it won't include everything everyone wants.
"It's going to look different than what I might write, or the president might write," he said.
House works on own plan
A similar effort on immigration is said to be under way in the House, involving a group of Republicans and Democrats.
Two senior House
Democratic sources briefed on the effort told CNN the group was working
to release some sort of outline of its plan soon, possibly as early as
this week, but concede "they are not as far along as the Senate."
Like the Senate
framework, the House plan will include a path to citizenship, but
details of how that will work are still being discussed.
The Senate proposal is a good starting point, Rep. Joe Garcia, D-Florida, said Tuesday on CNN.
"I think it puts us in a very good place," he said.
