Immigration Landmines in the Funding Bill
By Mark Krikorian on February 14, 2019
The text of the funding bill was released last night/this morning, and lawmakers are expected to vote on the 1,169-page measure as early as this evening. The bill is disappointing in many respects, but if it had been as advertised earlier, it might have been tolerable.
But my fears that senators Durbin and Leahy would trick the Republican conferees (none of whom knows the first thing about immigration policy) were realized. Standing out among the many distasteful provisions are two poison pills that I hope the Republican committee members either didn’t know about or didn’t understand.
The first regards the fence. I’m not fence-first guy, but physical barriers really are needed on some parts of the border, and the president has been flexible on this in the face of implacable Democratic opposition. Thus the news that the Dems agreed to $1.375 billion for the construction of “primary pedestrian fencing†(i.e., high barriers, not the low ones intended simply to stop vehicles, in places where there’s none now) seemed like a win.
It’s not. That’s because the bill allows the fencing to be built only in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in South Texas. It’s surely needed there, but real barriers are also needed elsewhere, such as the parts of the Arizona or New Mexico borders where there’s only vehicle fencing.
But the Democrats had a reason for this limitation. The bill states:
https://cis.org/Krikorian/Immigration-Landmines-Funding-Bill
