No consensus over Immigration Bill

Efforts at bringing about a consensus between the House of Representatives and the Senate over the Immigration Bill suffered a setback with the Speaker of the House saying he intended to take a 'long look' at the Senate measure that offered American citizenship to millions of illegals.

With the House version of the immigration legislation nowhere close to what the Senate had come up with, the influential Republican said hearings must be held in the House before appointing members to hammer out a compromise in a conference committee.

"We're going to take a long look at it," Speaker Dennis Hastert said on Tuesday with the House Majority Leader John Boehner agreeing to this.

"I think we should know clearly what's in the Senate Bill," Boehner said. At least one critic in the Senate, Texas Senator John Cornyn has scheduled hearings to see how employers

are going to verify the legality of the workers they were hiring.

For Cornyn, holding hearings on a Bill that has been cleared by the Senate floor is highly unusual and at the very minimum complicates the process of getting a unified Bill ready before Summer recess this August.

The Senate Bill that has to be matched with the one that cleared the House last year has among other things a provision for upping the H1B visa to 115,000 annually from the current 65,000 and a built in yearly increase of 20 per cent.

The House has nothing on the H1B visas. But most importantly the House Bill on Immigration does not have a Guest Worker programme that is backed by the White House.

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