Letter fights `amnesty' for illegal immigrants

Myrick, McHenry among conservatives who signed warning.

By Tim Funk
Charlotte Observer

More than 70 conservative House members -- including GOP Reps. Patrick McHenry and Sue Myrick of North Carolina -- sent a warning to the Senate last week on the hot-button issue of immigration.

Their message: We don't like what we're hearing about Senate proposals to launch a guest-worker program and legalize undocumented foreign workers already here.

Ideas like that are "fundamentally incompatible" with get-tough legislation already passed by the House and could "doom any chance of a real reform bill reaching the president's desk this year," the House members wrote in a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Specter chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering the more comprehensive of two Senate immigration bills getting a closer look as the upper chamber gears up for an explosive debate on the issue later this month.

The other Senate bill is an echo of the enforcement-only House version favored by grass-roots conservatives. It was just introduced by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a presidential candidate who needs to woo -- not alienate -- conservatives if he hopes to win his party's nomination.

The House letter to Specter touts the House provisions -- including one to build a fence along the Mexican border -- as steps "to restore the anarchical borders and to reform our dysfunctional immigration system."

The bill before the Senate panel also would beef up border security. But other, more controversial provisions would offer some illegal immigrants a path to permanent residency and eventual citizenship if they pay a $2,000 fine, apply for six-year temporary status, keep a job, pay taxes and show proficiency in English.

Its supporters, including Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., say it would bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and legalize the workers U.S. businesses say they need.

The House letter writers dismissed that thinking, saying the proposals "amount to little more than thinly disguised attempts to provide amnesty."

Besides McHenry of Cherryville and Myrick of Charlotte, the letter was signed by GOP Reps. Charles Taylor of Brevard, Virginia Foxx of Banner Elk, Walter Jones of Farmville, and Gresham Barrett of Westminster, S.C.