WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans have dropped legislation that would help pregnant legal immigrants and their children to regain health care benefits that were taken away as part of the 1996 welfare reform law, legislative aides said Monday.
In closed-door meetings late last week, GOP negotiators decided to jettison a version of the measure that would have given states the option of offering government-subsidized health care to legal immigrant children and pregnant women who have been in the country at least two years, according to Republican aides.
The legislation had been backed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including a number of Latino House members. Two of its leading backers were Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles). Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as well as two Republican Senate candidates, Reps. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) and Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), also supported the measure.
But several powerful Texas lawmakers, led by Texas GOP Reps. Bill Archer and Lamar S. Smith, said that such a change would be an unacceptable retreat from welfare reform.
"It is critically important to ensure that noncitizens come to America for opportunity and not for welfare," wrote Smith and Archer in a letter to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
The issue highlights divisions between Republican lawmakers who want to reach out to Latinos and those who take a hard-line anti-immigrant stand. For now, at least, support appears stronger for the anti-immigrant position.
"There's division on all kinds of things," said Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-San Diego), an early supporter of the provision to restore benefits. "Perinatal service is so much more cost-effective than having a premature delivery. From a humanitarian point of view, it's the right thing, [and] from a budgetary point of view, it's the right thing to do."
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, has not taken a position on the bill, his staff said. Texas has a large immigrant population, and Bush has sought to reach out to Latinos.
The GOP is similarly divided on whether to give amnesty to more than 300,000 Latinos who failed to apply when amnesty was available but have been living and working in the United States for many years.
