President Obama Taking Wait And See Approach On House Immigration Plan

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President Obama praised the Senate’s “Gang of 8” for producing a bipartisan immigration bill he could support on Tuesday, but declined to weigh in on the state of negotiations in the House, where lawmakers have yet to produce a comprehensive reform plan. 

“On immigration reform, I’ve been impressed by the work that was done by the Gang of 8 in the Senate,” Obama said at a press conference in the White House. “The bill that they produced is not the bill that I would have written, there are elements of it that I would change, but I do think that it meets the basic criteria that i laid out from the start which is we got to have more effective border security, although it should build on the great improvements that have been made on border sceurity over the last four to five years. We should make sure that we are cracking down on employers that aregaming the system, we should make the legal immigration system work more efectivey so that the waits are not as burdensome, the bureaucracy is not as complicated so that we can continue to attract the best and the brightest from around the world to our shores in a legal fashion, and we want to make sure that we got a pathway to citizenship that is tough but allows people to earn over time their legal status here in this country.”

Regarding the House’s unreleased bill, Obama did not address suggestions from members involved in negotiations that it might be more conservative, but said he would judge it by the same standards he applied to the Senate bill. 

“Now, I haven’t seen what members of the House are yet proposing,” he said, “and maybe they think that they can answer some of those questions differently or better and I think we got to be open midned in seeing what they come up with.”

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