Of the many issues left unfinished by Congress when they
left town for the holiday break, an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws
is one that is certainly not going away.

2013 saw the first major attempt at a comprehensive immigration
reform bill since 2006-2007, when it was a top priority for
President George W. Bush. Anger from the right and the left helped kill
several pieces of legislation, shelving the issue for several years. 

After
the 2012 presidential election, when Republican nominee Mitt Romney recorded a dismal
27 percent to President Obama’s 71 percent among Hispanic voters, there was widespread speculation – bolstered
by an endorsement
for comprehensive immigration reform from the Republican National Committee – that
2013 was the year with the best hope at tackling a contentious issue.

 

 That didn’t happen. Things moved quickly at first: a
bipartisan group of eight lawmakers that included Sen. Marco Rubio, a
Cuban-American Republican from Florida, brought together a diverse coalition of business and
faith leaders, Latino advocacy and labor groups, farmers, Silicon Valley and muscled
a comprehensive bill through the Senate with a bipartisan vote. Their
version would provide a conditional path to citizenship for many of the
estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States, pour
billions of dollars into the efforts to seal off and secure the southern border
and ports of entry, create a new work visa for future immigrants, implement
broad electronic work verification and overhaul the legal visa system to
eliminate backlogs and update various visa categories.

The bill, for all its bipartisan bonhomie, was dead
on arrival in the House of Representatives, where many in the Republican
majority oppose either the idea of passing a massive, comprehensive piece of
legislation in the style of Obamacare or rewarding immigrants who had crossed
the border illegally or overstayed visas with anything that might be perceived
by their base as amnesty.

A bipartisan group in the House working on a comprehensive
bill collapsed in the fall. Democrats introduced a version of the Senate bill
that has a few Republican cosponsors, but is still the hefty kind of
legislation House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has rejected. The Republican chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, helped usher
a series of smaller bills through his committee, none of which dealt with the illegal
population and none of which had Democratic support. Despite several public
exhortations by Mr. Obama this fall, no immigration bills were put to a
vote on the floor of the House. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said
before lawmakers left town that Boehner told her immigration would “have to
wait until next year.”

• Poll: immigrants prize deportation relief over citizenship
• One last immigration reform push before Congress leaves town 

All the while, advocates
who want to see Congress pass legislation that includes a path to citizenship
for unauthorized immigrants have gotten more
aggressive in their efforts to convince the House
Republican leadership to put a bill to a vote, stopping by their homes, offices
and even breakfast spots,
uninvited, to visit, pray, and demand a vote.

But the pressure
isn’t limited to House Republicans, who advocates view as the main obstacle to
legislation passing Congress. As the year comes to a close with no resolution
in sight, they have also stepped up criticism of Mr. Obama, whose
administration has deported record numbers of immigrants in recent years.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced
that in 2013, they deported 368,644 people, the majority of whom were
apprehended while or shortly after attempting to illegally enter the United
States. That’s a 10-percent
drop from 2011, when
410,000 were deported.

 

 A young undocumented
student heckled the president during a speech on immigration earlier this
year, echoing the activists who have called on the administration to halt
deportations. Mr. Obama says he cannot.

“I respect the passion of these young people because
they feel deeply about the concerns for their families,” he told the protestor
at the speech. “If in fact I could solve all these problems without passing
laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws — that’s
part of our tradition — and so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend
like I can do something by violating our laws.” 

 The pressure
that built toward the end of the year will continue into 2014, the activists
have promised, making it a difficult issue for either the president or House
Republicans to ignore. And increasingly, it seems like continued deportations will
be at the heart of advocates grievances.

“As we enter
the holiday season, there will be a lot of heavy hearts knowing that 1,100
people are being deported every day and that families are being torn apart,”
said Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy
group. “We won’t stop until the deportations stop.”

Greisa
Martinez, an organizer with United We Dream, a youth-led immigrant advocacy
group, reflected on her group’s demonstration at a detention center in Arizona
that stopped a bus trying to deport people. “This is the kind of escalation and action that both the Obama
administration and Congress can expect to see more of in 2014 if they don’t
step up and provide relief and reform to our communities,” he said.

A recent survey
from Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project shows that by a margin of 55 percent
to 35 percent, Hispanic adults believe it is more important for undocumented
immigrants to be able to live and work in the U.S. legally without the threat
of deportation than it is to have a pathway to citizenship (though a pathway to
citizenship has extremely high levels of support among Hispanics at 89
percent). Numbers like these could give leverage to lawmakers who are
interested in making some reforms to the legal immigration system, but not
necessarily offering any kind of citizenship.

If House
Republicans were to offer up legislation that legalized, but did not give
citizenship, to a large portion of the undocumented community, that could put
pressure on the president to compromise. Although he doesn’t have another
election to worry about, his approval rating among Latinos has plunged 23
points in the last year, according
to Gallup, from 75 percent in December 2012 to 52 percent in November 2013.
That could spell bad news for Democrats running next fall.

The Pew survey found that 43 percent of Hispanic adults
would place more blame with Republicans in Congress if immigration reform fails
to pass, but 34 percent said they would hold Democrats and the president responsible.

Though the conventional wisdom holds that passing any major
legislation in an election year is a heavy lift, there are signs that may not
hold true in 2014 because the growing population of Latino voters will exert
greater influence in the coming elections.

“The chances of
congressional passage of immigration reform are good because each party has
political reasons for wanting to deliver for Latinos and the business
community,” said Darrel West, an immigration policy expert at the Brookings
Institution. “The biggest challenge is the pathway to citizenship, where the
parties remain far apart. A possible compromise could involve creating a
pathway that is longer and has more conditions that were in the Senate bill.
That will displease reformers but provide cover for Boehner to move the
legislation.”

John Feehery, a
Republican strategist a­nd former congressional aide, said getting immigration
done will be important for the GOP in the long run if they can do it on their
own terms – in a series of shorter bills. But he also predicted that
legislation won’t move for several months until the primaries for the 2014
elections have concluded House members will less concerned about challenges
from the right.

“The timing on this
is very important,” Feehery said. “What was stupid to do becomes smart to do a
little bit later in the year.”

Eliseo Medina, an
activist and former international secretary-treasurer of the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), promised that immigrant advocacy groups
would visit “as many congressional districts as possible” in the coming months
to press their case. Other advocates like Eddie Carmona, the campaign director
for the PICO National Network’s Campaign for Citizenship, credited the work of activists
around the country in securing support from Republican representatives like Jeff Denham and David Valadao of
California. The two, along with Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., have signed onto the
House Democrats’ immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship.

Advocates are certainly
counting on the impending election to bolster their own pressure on Washington
to act on the issue. Angelica Salas, Executive Director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant
Rights of Los Angeles said that if lawmakers don’t address the issue in 2014, “voters
are ready to remind them at the ballot box they are replaceable.”

In a July poll, Latino Decisions, a group that studies Latino voting trends, found that among Latino voters who voted in the 2010
midterm elections, 39 percent of respondents said that they would be more
likely to support Republican congressional candidates in the next election if
the GOP took a leadership role in passing an immigration reform bill that includes
a pathway to citizenship. In a separate question, 50 percent said that they
would be more likely to support Republican congressional candidates who
supported immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship even if they
disagreed with Republicans on other issues like health care and taxes.

The future of
immigration policy in the House rests largely in the hands of the leadership,
and especially Boehner. He has expressed a commitment to overhauling the nation’s
laws all year as long as it is done on the House’s terms, but has also failed
so far to put a single bill on the floor. Still, the issue is not going away and
Boehner announced earlier this month that he hired
Rebecca Tallent, a former staffer for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was
actively involved in the 2006-2007 reform efforts.

Despite his
protestations he
will never work with the Senate on the bill they passed, Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told The Hill newspaper that Boehner will ultimately face too
much pressure from his members who could be at risk if the House doesn’t act on
immigration.

“He’ll have a
lot of pressure from his members now that the election is getting closer,”
Reid said.
“Some of his members are in very marginal districts, where they
need to do something on immigration.”