Boehner didn’t specify a timetable, saying, “I’m much more concerned about doing it right than I am in meeting some deadline.”
The House Judiciary Committee has approved several immigration bills. They include measures to increase immigration security and enforcement, establish a new temporary-worker visa for agriculture, expand the E-Verify worker-identification system and increase the number of visas for highly skilled workers. The House Homeland Security Committee also has cleared a border-security bill.
Those bills have received no floor votes.
Pelosi favors a broad-scope immigration measure. She told reporters, “Today and in the future, we must keep the momentum [going] forward for comprehensive immigration reform that secures our borders, protects our workers and reunites our families, and has a path to permanent legal status up to citizenship.”
Pelosi said she still thinks Congress will pass a comprehensive immigration measure, but she added, “If it doesn’t happen in this year, it’s unlikely that it’s going to happen in an election year.”
Repeating views he has expressed since late May, Boehner said, “We are not going to do the Senate bill.”
He said, “The Senate bill in my view is flawed. ... I don’t believe that the [bill’s] triggers for border security are appropriate, and it’s going to allow a process to start and continue without the border being secure.”
Boehner also said he doesn’t believe the Senate bill’s enforcement provisions will “give the American people the confidence that we will, in fact, stop this unlimited flow of undocumented workers from coming to our country.”