Administration Vague on Issue of Citizenship
WASHINGTON — As the struggle over an immigration overhaul reaches a make-or-break stage in the Senate, President Bush has adopted a strategy of calculated ambiguity that some worry may increase the risk of a legislative stalemate.
Administration officials have been closely involved in this week's swirling Senate negotiations over proposals to rewrite the nation's immigration laws.
But, in public and private, Bush and his aides have avoided a clear position on the most difficult issue dividing senators: whether to provide a clear path to American citizenship for as many as 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States -- a process critics deride as amnesty.
The formal "statement of administration position" on immigration reform issued Tuesday night only deepened the confusion. Within hours of the statement's release, senators sponsoring the two principal alternatives for handling illegal immigrants both claimed it as a White House endorsement of their approach.
"That tells you the White House statement was slippery enough that both sides could plausibly claim support," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group that opposes efforts to legalize illegal immigrants.
Those sympathetic to the White House approach say it is executing a sophisticated legislative strategy by allowing the Senate maximum flexibility to reach its own compromise.
"I think it's a shrewd strategy, because [Bush] is giving them enough leeway to see what the political marketplace can bear -- to see where Democrats and Republicans from very different perspectives can come together around an answer," said Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who supports an immigration overhaul.
Others, on both sides of the issue, worry that Bush's reticence increases the danger that no bill will emerge from the complex legislative maneuvering in the Senate. "If he's interested in real reform, he should step in and take a side," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group. "Maybe they can sit back and think it's going to be fine [in the Senate]
The dispute involves one of the most emotional issues in the overall immigration debate.
Legislation approved late last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee would allow illegal immigrants already in the U.S. to work as temporary guest workers and then apply for permanent legal residence, and ultimately citizenship, without leaving the country.
