Fate of Appropriation Bills During Lame Duck Congress
Prospects for passage of remaining spending bills in lame-duck session reportedly grow dim . This week, Senate GOP conservatives blocked action on several spending bills, arguing that they could become vehicles for an earmark-laden omnibus or "minibus." Adieu the Lame Duck!
This may practically mean that any piecemeal legislation of immigration bills is losing ground for any chances, and the immigration legislation may return to the CIR debate under the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress. Immigrants may as well be prepared to deal with the current immigrant visa backlogs for a while. The State Department has yet to release the prediction for visa number movement during the rest of FY 2007, but considering the fact that a huge traffic of EB-2 cases have been processed during the last one year, the progress of EB-2 numbers can slow down as time goes on. We really hope that the Congress passes the CIR legisation as early as possible in coming year. Unfortunately, anti-immigration forces have already sharpened their knives to bash illegal immigrants and through such tactics to delay or block success of any immigration legislations (not just illegal immigration) along the way. Immigrant community should watch out against such forces and never join them in one way or another bashing the illegal immigrants, resulting in division of the immigrant community and their own suicide. They are enticing part of employment-based immigration aspirants with a slogan that they support legal immigration but they do not support illegal immigration. When the reality will be that piecemeal immigration legislations may continuously face strong challenge and both legal and illegal immigration issues may be handled in a packet, the tactics is practically to kill any chances for enactment of employment-based immigration bills as well. People may recall how S.1932 was killed. (Legal/Employment Based Immigration Bill which the Senate passed at the end of 2005 but killed at the House.) The anti-immigration legislators in the House at the time engaged in a media campaign and immigrant community with the argument that the whole immigration issues should be handled in a packet. What an irony that the similar group is now arguing that the employment-based immigration bills should be enacted in a piecemeal fashion, when they know that the 110th Congress may act exactly what they had avocated in S. 1932. What a flip -flop! Watch out. Xenophoebic segment of the population makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. They are not color-blind.