House leader says Republicans have a ‘lack of trust’ in president’s abilities and implies they will not co-operate

The prospects for meaningful reform to the US immigration system were dealt a blow on Thursday as House speaker John Boehner warned that any legislation “would be difficult to pass this year”.



Boehner had raised expectations in the White House that a deal was achievable after criticising more conservative colleagues late last year for opposing his efforts to reach consensus on bipartisan issues.

But the GOP leadership’s attempt to apply this to the vexed question of legalising America’s 12 million undocumented migrants appears to have stalled just days after Boehner proposed a compromise measure to his colleagues at a Republican party retreat in Maryland.

This plan would have sought to give legal recognition to undocumented migrants, but not the path to full citizenship that Democrats have sought and that was contained in a bipartisan Senate bill that passed last summer.

Such a compromise would have been difficult to reach even with such a deal, because many Democrats fear it would create a “two-tier” workforce. It has also proved impossible to sell to conservative Republicans.

Speaking to reporters in Congress on Thursday, Boehner said the efforts had stalled because there was a “lack of trust” among his members in Obama’s ability to deliver other aspects of the immigration reform package such as tighter border security.

“For the past 15 months, I’ve talked about the need to get immigration reform done. It’s an important issue in our country that’s been kicked around forever and needs to be dealt with,” Boehner said.

“Having said that, we outlined our principles last week to our members – principles that our members, by and large, support – [but] the American people, including many of my members, don’t trust that the reform we’re talking about will be implemented as intended to be.”

Boehner said Obama’s history of changing how healthcare reform was implemented was the major factor “and it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted Obama had a track record of delivering on border control, pointing to increased numbers of security staff.

“The president’s record on border security has been well documented and testified to by Republicans and Democrats,“ he said. “We are going to keep working on [passing reform] and think there has been significant progress. We are confident that Republican leaders, and people who officials listen to, like business, strongly support immigration reform. We are going to get this done. It’s not going to be easy but 2014 presents the best opportunity we have ever had.“

Republicans initially feared that failure to pass immigration reform would hurt their chances of attracting non-white voters in elections, but increasingly the party seems to have decided that making an issue of Obama’s competency is an electoral asset.

“The big theme for us in the midterms is not going to be Obamacare, but Obama’s competency,” one GOP campaign official told the Guardian on Wednesday. “The problems with Obamacare are the best example of that, but we want to convince voters that it goes much further than that.”