Immigration job not done

Any pretense for passing proposed Spokane City Initiative 2015-1, allowing city police to stop and interrogate anyone strictly to ascertain immigration status, would already have been eliminated if U.S. House Republican leadership, including Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, had done their job.

They never allowed a full House vote on the bipartisan immigration bill passed June 2013 by the U.S. Senate, even though the bill had enough House votes to pass. And President Obama would have signed it. The bill resulted from bipartisan cooperation among lawmakers, business groups, labor unions, agricultural interests and immigration advocates, and would have rendered Initiative 2015-1 obsolete.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects the bipartisan Senate immigration bill would reduce federal budget deficits by $197 billion over the next decade. It is supported by such pro-business and pro-agriculture groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the local Washington Growers League, an influential Eastern Washington agribusiness association working on immigration in unusual alliance with the Washington Federation of State Employees.

Let’s elect Joe Pakootas and oust McMorris Rodgers in 2016 in order to promote House passage of the Senate immigration bill, and to better serve the interests of our high-poverty, low-income district.

Norm Luther

Spokane