Senator wants bitarisanship on Daca.

WASHINGTON — On many policy issues, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis is a reliable red vote. But on immigration, Tillis is trying to find purple.

Despite voting with President Trump’s agenda 96% of the time, according to the political tracking website FiveThirtyEight, the North Carolina senator has emerged as one of the key lawmakers working across the aisle to compromise on immigration legislation.


A key issue Tillis is trying to find consensus on between Democrats and Republicans is providing legal protections to the nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Former president Obama issued an executive order that shielded them from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. President Trump reversed the order in September but gave Congress six months to find a solution. There is bipartisan agreement that protections need to continue for DACA recipients, also known as DREAMers, but the details are still being debated.

Tillis is trying to find the sweet spot. The North Carolina Republican is part of a group of lawmakers who have been negotiating on how to pair legal protections for the Dreamers with enough increased border security to satisfy Republicans, but not be too extreme as to turn off Democrats.

Democratic votes will be needed to pass any bill in the Senate where most legislation requires 60 votes and Republicans hold a narrow 52-48 majority. That margin will narrow even more when newly elected Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama takes his Senate seat sometime in January.

“You need to have that balance between what I think is a compassionate, sustainable solution for the DACA population but also address the legitimate concerns about border security and about interior enforcement that will make it less likely that we’ll be having to have another DACA solution, 10 years from now or 12 years from now,” Tillis told USA TODAY at an interview in his office last week. In the past year, illegal border crossings have declined.


He said that he’s willing to block out demands from the far right of his party as long as Democrats are willing to do the same for the far left.

“The far-right who think anything less than mass deportation is unacceptable, we’re not looking for their support," Tillis said. ““And the far-left. anybody who thinks anything other than open borders and, you know, just a pathway (into the U.S.) without any sense of securing our borders, those are two voices that are really not productive voices.”

“What's always struck me about Sen Tillis is that he is a principled pragmatic, and what I mean by that is he's going to adhere to his conservative principles but he wants to get things done,” said Ali Noorani, who heads the National Immigration Forum, a group which had Tillis as their keynote speaker this fall. National Immigration Forum tries to convince conservatives that being pro-immigration is beneficial and the group sees Tillis as a positive spokesman in that effort. The group is advocating strongly for legal protections for DREAMers before the end of the year.

"We are in the process of negotiating with Republicans to provide a significant investment in border security in exchange for DACA," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "I’m hopeful we can reach an agreement on that issue."

Tillis is a co-sponsor of the SUCCEED Act which would provide a merit-based pathway to citizenship over a minimum of a 15-year period for DACA recipients and is designed to be paired with separate border and interior security legislation. He’s also a co-sponsor of the SECURE Act which would provide for temporary work-permits for DACA recipients but also includes tough new provisions on border and interior enforcement.

And he’s open to negotiations which prompted harsh criticism from hardline groups. In their report on the SECURE Act, the anti-immigration, pro-Trump news outlet Breitbart News described Tillis as “a strong advocate for outsourcing Americans’ jobs.”


Chris Chmielenski, director of content and activism for NumbersUSA, a group that advocates reducing legal immigration, said that while President Trump’s victory has pushed many Republicans further right on immigration he hasn’t seen a shift from Tillis.

“He approaches immigration through the eyes of big business and big business typically wants a looser labor market,” Chmielenski said. NumbersUSA feels that the SECURE Act doesn’t go far enough to limit illegal immigration.


Meanwhile, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin — who is one of the Democrats leading efforts to pass DREAMer protections before the end of the year and has been in talks with Tillis for the last year — dismissed the SECURE Act as one “designed to delay and stop any serious bipartisan effort to solve this crisis.”

Durbin is the original sponsor of the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship on a shorter timeline than the SUCCEED Act. While his bill doesn’t include border security, Durbin told reporters last week that Democrats offered up a compromise bill assembled from the DREAM Act and multiple security provisions as an effort to compromise with Republicans. However, of the provisions Durbin mentioned, key Republican priorities — such as an end to chain migration and sanctuary cities — were not included. Chain migration is a term used to refer to the practice that allows immigrants to sponsor family members to come to the U.S. And sanctuary cities have policies that offer protection for 0ing to illegal immigration.

“It is very difficult to imagine putting this off” until next year, Durbin said on a call with reporters last week. Durbin and Democratic leadership have said Congress should not break for the holidays without a solution for DACA recipients.



Durbin remained optimistic Wednesday. He told USA TODAY that negotiations were "progressing" but needed to speed up if they were to be able to get a compromise done by next week. He said he thought it was still possible.

Tillis said he would like to see a solution before the end of the year, but said that if Democrats try to shut down the government over immigration “they do it at the peril of the DACA population” because a single-party solution won’t last as long.

And even if the Senate can hash something out over the next couple weeks, the bill faces a more perilous path in the House where Republicans have enough votes to pass legislation along party lines so they don’t need to bend to Democrats’ demands. But that also means their demands will likely be more conservative than what the Senate produces and it may be difficult to reconcile the differences — or bring up a bill at all.

Conservatives there, including fellow North Carolinian, Rep. Mark Meadows who leads the hardline House Freedom Caucus, have said they don’t want to see any immigration legislation that doesn’t have the support of the majority of the House Republican conference.

Meadows has also previously said Congress should not attempt to try and jam an immigration bill through before the end of the year as part of must-pass legislation such as a spending bill but should be a stand-alone bill.



http://www.wbir.com/mobile/article/n...a-f895578535aa

SUCCEED Act which would provide a merit-based pathway to citizenship over a minimum of a 15-year period for DACA.

Thank you, but hell no.

15 years? Lol. All those 'dreamer kids' are going to be retried by then.

Right, I know beggers can’t be choosers but yeah they got me Fucked up with that bill too .....

We can have many fixes, but until the Republican leadership steps up and brings them up for a vote they are all meaningless.

U just said u waited 15 years, now they give u something, and u say no? Unfortunately, beggars can’t be choosers. We can only ask for compassion, if they decided we are not worthy, what can we do? This is my opinion, anything is better than nothing. Republicans can decide to fuck everyone up then do it, but at least they are now considering us, a small portion to be good, therefore, willing to help. It’s like a drowning person decline to be helped, there is only one ending.

Oh just act on something that isn't the Bridge Act already. For f*cks sake. Time for action.

the problems aren't having bills because we have plenty of good bipartisan ones along with the ones coming, it's bringing them to a vote that's the real problem. this ties into needing something to pass now before the year's over.
you think they're stalling now?
this'll be nothing compared to next year.

Exactly. Any act that allows travel is good and GC at some point.

Here is your chance to show how much you care about us Dems.

Dear Dems, you cannot let the can be kicked down the road of possibilities and wishful thinking that you can dominate congress after the midterm elections. There is not guarantee of that.