GOP seeks support for immigration bill

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders on Wednesday sought to find support for an immigration compromise, telling lawmakers that President Donald Trump was backing the still-evolving bill.

A day after top Republicans said the House would vote next week on two competing immigration measures, it was widely assumed that a hardright measure would lose. That bill would grant only limited opportunities to young immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally but hope to remain in the U.S. It also would impose tough restrictions on legal immigration and bolster border security.

GOP leaders, negotiating with quarreling moderates and conservatives, were still writing the second bill. Republicans said it would contain a way for young immigrants, known as Dreamers, to qualify for permanent residence and potentially become citizens, while accepting conservatives’ demands to finance Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico and restrictions on legal immigration.

With Republicans battling to keep their House majority in November’s elections, merely holding the immigration votes, win or lose, achieves some political objectives. The plan helped party leaders block unhappy moderates from trying to force the House to consider immigration bills considered too liberal by many Republicans, and it will let lawmakers assert that they tried to address the issue.

If both bills lose, “at least you know where everyone stands,” said Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Democrats seemed likely to oppose both packages. A day after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., said Democrats would fight any measure advancing Trump’s immigration policies, the leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said her group’s goal was to have “zero Democratic support” for the GOP bills.

Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., said the Republican measures “are going to make it clearer than ever that Dreamers are pawns for a wall. That is going to be a very difficult thing to defend” in the November elections, she said.

The bills represent the GOP’s attempt to address the issue of Dreamers. Trump last year terminated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has temporarily shielded hundreds of thousands of them from deportation. Federal courts have kept the program functioning for now.

Even if the compromise measure passed in the House, its fate in the Senate was in doubt. Democrats there have enough votes to scuttle any bill.

Trump’s backing — especially if he announced it publicly — could help nail down some support. But GOP “no” votes seemed likely, including by some conservatives dubious about granting what they consider amnesty to people in the U.S. illegally.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon told a group of House conservatives Wednesday that “if the House votes for amnesty, then it will deflate the base and they’ll stay home,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who invited Bannon. King said Bannon warned that it could cost Republicans control of the House.

Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., a Freedom Caucus member, said it was “a pretty big compromise” for him to support the conservative immigration bill because he doesn’t consider it restrictive enough. He said he’d examine details of the middle-ground legislation that leaders were crafting before deciding whether to back it. But he said Trump’s support didn’t sell him on the plan.