Bob Goodlatte, the House judiciary chairman, seems a pretty low-key Republican congressman to be caught in the midst of the most heated political fight on Capitol Hill – immigration reform – but the 62-year-old, who has had 11 terms in Congress, says that the current immigration status quo is unacceptable.
Goodlatte claims that he is “ready to move now, I’m ready to move after the election, I’m ready to move in the next Congress”. That said, the defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor last week seemed to see the chance of any such reform hitting rock bottom, with Goodlatte admitting there is now little chance of reform being passed prior to the August recess. Cantor’s opponent accused him of being in favor of amnesty and helping big business to bring cheap labor into the United States at the expense of American workers.
Speaking before Cantor’s loss, Goodlatte told Fox News Latino that members have to face the fact that immigration reform is a big issue that needs to be addressed and that it is not going to go away. “The more time that goes by, the more the distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration – one being a good thing, the other being an undesirable thing – they’re getting blurred by the president, by state legislatures and so on.”
Goodlatte has blamed Obama for the rise in child immigrants, following the party line of accusing the president of lax enforcement of existing immigration law.