Republicans rip Obama immigration plan; Rubio calls it 'dead on arrival'

Congressional Republicans on Sunday criticized a White House plan on immigration reform that allows illegal immigrants to become legal, permanent residents within eight years -- saying Congress will never pass such a proposal and questioning President Obama’s intent.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said the plan is untenable and so outside of what the country wants that it suggests President Obama is not sincere about passing immigration reform.

“The president is torpedoing his own plan,” Paul told “Fox News Sunday.” “It shows me he is really not serious. … The bill won’t pass.”

The draft immigration bill being circulated by the White House also includes plans for a new visa for illegal immigrants living in the United States, as first reported by USA Today.

Obama's bill would create a "Lawful Prospective Immigrant" visa for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the country. The bill includes more security funding and requires business owners to adopt a system for verifying the immigration status of new hires within four years, the newspaper said.

On Saturday, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the White House proposal "half-baked and seriously flawed."

Rubio -- part of an eight-member, bipartisan Senate panel working on an immigration reform bill -- also said the purported proposal was disappointing to those “working on serious solutions” and repeats failures of past legislation.

He said the White House also erred in not seeking input from Republican lawmakers.

"If actually proposed, the president's bill would be dead on arrival in Congress, leaving us with unsecured borders and a broken legal immigration system for years to come," Rubio said in a statement.

Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday the White House is working with members and staffers of the so-called “Gang of Eight” and that the White House hasn’t proposed anything so far to Capitol Hill on immigration.

McDonough declined to answer repeated questions on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about why the White House didn’t first consult Rubio, consider the key Republican on the issue.

“We are doing exactly what we said we would do, which is we will be prepared in the event that the bipartisan talks on the Hill … do not work out,” he told NBC.

USA Today also reported that the bill would require that immigrants pass a criminal background check, submit biometric information and pay fees to qualify for the new visa.

Immigrants who served more than a year in prison for a criminal conviction or were convicted of three or more crimes and were sentenced to a total of 90 days in jail would not be eligible. Crimes committed in other countries that would bar immigrants from legally entering the country would also be ineligible.

Those immigrants facing deportation would be eligible to apply for the visa, the newspaper reported. Immigrants would be eligible to apply for a green card within eight years, if they learn English and U.S. history and government, and they would later be eligible to become U.S. citizens.

House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan took back the praise he gave Obama for his State of the Union remarks on immigration.

“Putting these details out without a guest worker program, without addressing future flow, by giving advantage to those who cut in front of line for immigrants who came here legally, not dealing with border security adequately, that tells us that he's looking for a partisan advantage and not a bipartisan solution,” The Wisconsin Republican told ABC’s “This Week.”

Last month, the group of senators announced they had agreed on the general outline of an immigration plan.

Obama has said he would not submit his own legislation to Congress so long as law makers acted "in a timely manner." If they failed, he said, "I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away."

Paul also told Fox he will submit an amendment to the upcoming Senate bill calling for a General Accounting Office report stating U.S. borders are secure that must be periodically updated.

Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said Saturday that Obama still supports a bipartisan effort to craft a comprehensive immigration bill. "While the president has made clear he will move forward if Congress fails to act, progress continues to be made and the administration has not prepared a final bill to submit," he said in a statement.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, described the draft bill as a "very moderate" proposal. While the path to citizenship was welcomed by Noorani, he said not enough attention was being paid to future immigration.

"Commonsense immigration reform must include a functioning immigration system for the future," Noorani said in a statement. "Reform does not begin and end with citizenship and enforcement alone."

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It's MY job to deport foreigners who commit serious crime - and I'll fight any judge who stands in my way, says Home Secretary

Unless there are very exceptional circumstances, foreigners who have committed serious crimes in this country, or who have attempted to cheat the immigration system, should be deported from Britain.

Parliament wants that to happen, the public wants that to happen, and I want that to happen. But, too often, it is not happening.

Time and time again we are treated to the spectacle of people who have been found guilty of rape or serious assault being given the right to stay in this country.

It is not in the national interest that this situation continues. What is going on? The short answer is that some of our judges appear to have got it into their heads that Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, the ‘right to family life’, is an absolute, unqualified right.

This means that if a foreign criminal can show that he has a family in this country, they take the view he has a right to remain here, regardless of the gravity of the offences.

That interpretation is wrong. The Convention is quite plain: the right to family life is not an absolute right, like the right not to be tortured. It is a qualified right, and it can be restricted when that is required, for example, to protect public safety, or for the prevention of crime.

I thought that possibly the problem for the judges was that our Parliament had not explicitly stated how the right to  family life could be restricted.

So in June last year I ensured that the House of Commons was able to debate my amendments to the immigration rules.  Those amendments stated that in the usual case, any foreign national who was convicted of a serious crime should be deported, regardless of whether or not the criminal had a family in the UK.

After a vigorous debate, the Commons adopted the changes unanimously. There was no division because there was no one in the Commons who opposed them.

I made it clear that I would introduce primary legislation should the Commons’ acceptance of my amendments not be sufficient to persuade judges to change the way they interpreted Article Eight. But I hoped that the outcome of the debate would be enough.

Unfortunately, some judges evidently do not regard a debate in Parliament on new immigration rules, followed by the unanimous adoption of those rules,  as evidence that Parliament actually wants to see those new rules implemented.

As a justification for ignoring the new rules, one immigration judge recently stated that ‘the procedure adopted in relation to the introduction of the new rules provided a weak form of Parliamentary scrutiny. Parliament has not altered the legal duty of the judge determining appeals to decide on proportionality for him or herself’.

Just think for a moment what this judge is claiming. He is asserting that he can ignore the unanimous adoption by the Commons of new immigration rules on the grounds that he thinks this is a ‘weak form of parliamentary scrutiny’.

I find it difficult to see how that can be squared with the central idea of our constitution, which is that Parliament makes the law, and judges interpret what that law is and make sure the executive complies with it.

For almost all of the long history of disputes between judges and Parliament, it has been  common ground that Parliament is the ultimate law-maker, and that it is not for the judges to be legislators.

It is essential to democracy that the elected representatives of the people make the laws that govern this country – and not the judges.

Yet some judges seem to believe that they can ignore Parliament’s wishes if they think that the procedures for parliamentary scrutiny have been ‘weak’. That appears actually to mean that they can ignore Parliament when they think it came to the wrong conclusion.

Most judges, especially in our higher courts, do not take this attitude. One High Court judge, for example, has explicitly recognised that the new rules are ‘unquestionably valid laws, democratically enacted under a procedure which is necessary for the efficient practical functioning of Parliament’. The majority of judges share his view.

But a minority think that it is their role to determine, for instance, whether or not foreigners who commit serious crimes shall be deported. They are able to frustrate Government policy and prevent the deportation of criminals.

It is now clear that only explicit parliamentary legislation will convince them that the law is what Parliament says it is, not what they think it should be.

I am therefore determined to introduce primary legislation that will specify that foreign nationals who commit serious crimes shall, except in extraordinary circumstances, be deported.

Once this primary legislation has been enacted, it is surely inconceivable that judges in this country will maintain that it is they, rather than Parliament, who are entitled to decide how to balance the foreigner’s right to family life against our nation’s right to protect itself.

It is depressing that the steps we have already taken should have been insufficient to produce that result. The inevitable delays inherent in passing primary legislation will mean that there will be many more foreign criminals who successfully avoid deportation on the basis that they have a family here.

There will also be more victims of violent crimes committed by foreigners in this country – foreigners who  should have been, and could have been, deported.

This is not a dispute about respect for human rights, which I certainly agree is an essential part of any decent legal system. It is about how to balance rights against each other: in particular, the individual’s right to family life, the right of the individual to be free from violent crime, and the right of society to protect itself against foreign criminals.

One of the most distressing results of judges taking it on themselves to determine how that balance should be struck, in defiance of Parliament’s wishes, has been the damage done to the notion of human rights: in the popular imagination, ‘human rights’ are wrongly, but perhaps understandably, becoming  synonymous with legal dodges that allow criminals to escape proper punishment and to continue to prey on the public.

I am a great admirer of most of the judges in Britain.

I absolutely accept that the power of Ministers should be reviewed and restrained by independent judges who are appointed, not elected, and who are not accountable to the electorate for their decisions.

But the law in this country is made by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament. And our democracy is subverted when judges decide to take on that role for themselves.

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