Immigration Reform Calls for Action on 9/11 Commission Bill
by Chad Groening
November 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - An immigration reform group is urging Senate conferees to go along with the House version of the intelligence bill which includes key immigration reform provisions.
Jack Martin is special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which is based in Washington, DC. Martin says there is a major disagreement between the House and Senate over H.R. 10, the bill designed to implement recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. According to the FAIR spokesman, the House version contains a serious immigration enforcement and control regimen.
"[It provides for] better controls for identifying who's coming into the country and documentation that they may be able to get once they're in the country, and also better efforts to control our borders," Martin explains.
In contrast, he says the Senate version contains none of those immigration-related provisions. His group reports that House and Senate conferees are meeting this week to iron out legislative differences in the two bills. That is why his organization is encouraging concerned citizens to take action -- specifically, contacting Senate conferees, urging them to go along with the additional provisions that were adopted in the House.
"There's no doubt ... that the stripped-down version of the Senate is far from adequate, as far as we're concerned," Martin explains. Those inadequacies, he says, deal with the possibility for terrorists to take advantage of the permeability of America's borders -- "because of the tremendous numbers of illegal aliens that are coming across," he says -- and the ability of terrorists to hide in the United States among what Martin says is a "tremendously large illegal alien population" currently in the U.S.
FAIR says H.R. 10 is the "best chance to get some serious [immigration] reform passed" before the end of the year -- but only if the conferees can be convinced to go with the House version.
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