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Obama Steps Up For Illegal Immigrants

Paresh Dave |
January 29, 2013 | 12:16 p.m. PST

Executive Director

An illegal immigrant learns about President Obama's deferred action program at an event in October 2012. (Shako Liu/Neon Tommy)
An illegal immigrant learns about President Obama's deferred action program at an event in October 2012. (Shako Liu/Neon Tommy)
Entering himself into what will be a contentious battle this year to legalize millions of illegal immigrants, President Barack Obama laid out a comprehensive immigration reform plan Tuesday.

"The closer we get, the more emotional this debate is going to become," Obama said in a speech in Las Vegas. "There's few things more important to this society than who gets to come here and call this a home."

Between ramping up enforcement of existing laws and creating new programs to expand legal immigration, Obama's plan won't come cheap. But Obama said reforming the system is essential to growing the economy -- and the number of taxpayers -- by taking full advantage of all the talent available to the U.S.

Like a plan from a bipartisan group of U.S. senators released Sunday, Obama's plan would strengthen enforcement of laws barring employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Punishments would also be worse. He would phase in mandatory electronic verification over five years, with only some small businesses exempt. Social Security cards would get an upgrade to make them harder to counterfeit.

(More:Senators Outline Plan For Immigration Reform)

While such efforts are unlikely to meet any resistance in Congress, the president's goal of ensuring a pathway to citizenship for people already in the country illegally is likely to be opposed by many Republicans in Congress. In the House of Representatives, he'll need some Republican support. He said Tuesday that if Congress can't work out a plan on its own, he'll step in and push his even more audacious proposal.

Obama's plan would grant provisional legal status to undocumented people who pay taxes, pass background checks and pay fees. Once normal immigration backlogs are cleared, they could apply for permanent residency, and five years later, citizenship. The senators' plan wouldn't allow permanent residency until the nation's borders are deemed "secure." What exactly that means hasn't been determined yet.

The proposal from the president also calls for putting into law his deferred action program, which gives college graduates or armed forces veterans who came to the country illegally as minors the ability to become citizens.

The final leg of the president's plan is to streamline existing immigration laws by raising caps on immigration, creating a special visa for foreign entrepreneurs who attract U.S. investors and treating homosexual couples the same as heterosexual couples. Like the senators, he said foreign graduate students who graduated with advanced math of science degrees should get green cards upon graduation.

Read more of Neon Tommy's coverage on immigration reform here.

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