Mike Toomey Lobbyist News: Immigration Bills Trickling in Before 83rd Session
The following is a digest of as tory originally published at the Texas Tribune. The Texas Lobby Group is posting this summary as a public service for the people of Texas, other Texas lobbyists and lobbying companies, Texas government officials and consultants, and other interested parties.
The Texas House of Representatives has previously been littered with excessive amounts of pre-filed immigration bills. They covered a variety of ideas for reform, and saw their peak of accumulation in November of 2010 for the 2011 session. They included propositions to require schools to report student immigration status, to make the electronic employment verification system mandatory, and bills to take back birthright citizenship. Pre-filing regarding immigration reform bills for 2013 has not seen the same turnout of proposed bills, at least not yet. Presently, there have been only a few filed. This may be, in part, due to the many members of the House that are leaving this next session. These key representatives include Leo Berman, who proposed that birth certificates not be issued to illegal immigrants, and Burt Solomons who filed the “sanctuary cities” bill.
There are many opposing views in the House regarding what’s to be done about immigration. There are a million solutions, and a select few slots for action to be taken. It’s a little early to say that our Representative’s time and interest is not with immigration this session, however. “Last session’s sanctuary cities bill, which would have denied state funds to local or state entities that prevented their law enforcement officers from inquiring into the immigration status of a person arrested or detained, was not filed until February 2011. It was easily the most contentious bill that made it to the floor for a vote, though it failed to pass.” There could be many propositions made later in the game.
With a rapidly growing Latino population, there has been a matched rise in Democrat votes. The majority of the latino population tends to vote Democrat, and this has been the case for quite some time. Cristina Parker of the “Border Network for Human Rights”, based in El Paso, states that this is a huge reason why Republicans are so vigilantly anti-immigration. With Republicans filing a plethora of restrictions and reform bills in the House, it will be interesting to see where immigration law goes in the next session. It is virtually undisputed that we are in serious need of policy reform, the issue is how we go about it.
Read the original story here.