Free Republic

Three influential conservative groups on Tuesday urged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to pursue immigration reform in the House. In a letter to Boehner, American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, and American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas said their groups support many of the key elements in the immigration reform bill recently passed by the Senate, including the pathway to citizenship.

Congressional Democrats are drawing a firm line in the immigration debate: No reform without a path to citizenship. The four Democratic members of the Senate Gang of Eight pressed that point to their House counterparts in a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning, and attendees made it clear that without a pathway to citizenship, immigration reform won’t happen.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Monday said enhancements in border security must be “in place” before the process of granting legal status to 11 million illegal immigrants begins, laying down a new marker in the debate over immigration reform. “The House is going to do its own job on developing an immigration bill,” Boehner said Monday after an event on the Capitol steps on student loans. “But it’s real clear, from everything that I’ve seen and read over the last couple of weeks, that the American people expect that we’ll have strong border security in place before we begin the...

A small group of Senate and House Republicans are meeting Monday night to discuss how to pass an immigration overhaul through Congress. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been hungry to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws this Congress, is attending the session. -snip- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is involved in the planning, according to two sources.

As an overhaul of immigration laws shifts to the House, a right-leaning group is launching a new television ad campaign Monday that will call on House lawmakers -- and, implicitly, resistant Republicans -- to support the Senate-passed “border surge” as part of “conservative immigration reform." The ad seeks to influence rank-and-file lawmakers as House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) convenes Republicans behind closed doors to assess how the GOP majority will respond to the bipartisan Senate bill.

BOEHNER’S NEXT MOVE: The immigration debate is now squarely in the House of Representatives, with the Senate overwhelmingly passing its version of a comprehensive bill before the congressional break. ABC’s RICK KLEIN notes that House leaders will begin to chart their next steps this week with a special meeting of House Republicans on Wednesday. Speaker John Boehner will ultimately face the big choice: Whether to support a path to citizenship or notbut until then there are plenty of little questions. Will the bipartisan “gang” in the House break through with something like a similar group did in the Senate?

Has the moment for immigration reform passed? There's a school of thought growing within the GOP that argues the party doesn't need to win over Latino voters as badly as it needs to expand its popularity among white voters. -snip- Major Republican donors remain adamant in their desire to see Congress pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. They see the demographic reality that the national electorate is becoming less white, and they're firm in the belief that the GOP needs to connect with a more diverse universe of voters. Groups funded by such donors are preparing a concerted effort to...

House Republicans aren’t feeling pressure to tackle comprehensive immigration reform — not from the Senate, not from the business and religious communities and not from the many GOP-aligned groups backing the effort. From Karl Rove to Jeb Bush to Grover Norquist, an array of Republican heavyweights have called on the House GOP to embrace immigration reform. -snip- At the behest of the Speaker , the House is taking a more deliberate, methodical approach to immigration reform than the Senate and will begin in earnest with a special meeting of the Republican Conference on July 10.

President Barack Obama may be most linked to overhauling immigration policy, but on Wednesday, his predecessor, George W. Bush, will have a chance to weigh in on the issue. Bush will deliver opening remarks at a citizenship ceremony and immigration forum at his Dallas presidential center.