WASHINGTON — Lawmakers clashed anew over immigration Wednesday as Senate Republicans pushed to introduce far-reaching new enforcement measures and California's senators led an impassioned plea to allow in more foreign agriculture workers.
The extended exchanges -- often tart, sometimes angry -- came during debate on the homeland security spending bill, creating new fault lines and deepening old ones.
At one point, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to persuade the Senate to agree unanimously to a border enforcement measure without a roll-call vote. Reid accused Cornyn of impeding the measure for political reasons.
"It seems sometimes people like to have the issue rather than solving the issue," Reid said. "This [measure] would have gone a long ways toward easing the friction on both sides toward problems with immigration," he said. "It hasn't, and my friend ... still has an issue to talk about. Maybe that's more important to him than solving this problem."
Cornyn snapped back: "I thought we were getting along well until that last comment."
The measure in dispute was narrowly focused: It included funds for 700 miles of fencing, 300 miles of vehicle barriers, 23,000 Border Patrol agents, 105 ground-based radar sensors, and four unmanned planes.
In the end, no action was taken.
The sparring between Reid and Cornyn came just one month after the Senate failed to pass broad immigration legislation that would have granted citizenship to most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and added visas for high- and low-skilled workers.
The flare-up Wednesday started when Republican senators, describing the border as a national emergency on a par with Iraq, introduced an amendment that would have poured $3 billion into added fencing, technology and staffing along the U.S.-Mexico border.
It would have required mandatory jail time for people who overstayed their visas or reentered the country illegally after being deported. It also would have enabled new and far-reaching enforcement measures that Democrats opposed, giving police officers and hospital workers the power to inquire about anyone's immigration status and allowing the use of secret evidence to deny citizenship.
