WASHINGTON — The White House is working on early drafts of a comprehensive bill that would offer 11 million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship along the lines of the principles that the president laid out in Las Vegas several weeks ago, administration officials said.
President Obama revealed last month that his administration had already drafted immigration legislation. But he said he preferred to let a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers work out their own bill that could also tighten border security and provide employers with a way to verify the citizenship status of workers.
White House aides said that Mr. Obama remained pleased with the progress being made on Capitol Hill toward a complete overhaul of the nation's immigration system. But they said he would be prepared to submit legislation if the effort among lawmakers stalls.
"The president has made clear the principles upon which he believes any common-sense immigration reform effort should be based," Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. "We continue to work in support of a bipartisan effort, and while the president has made clear he will move forward if Congress fails to act, progress continues to be made and the administration has not prepared a final bill to submit."
On Saturday, USA Today reported that it had obtained portions of the president's draft legislation. The newspaper said the bill would allow illegal immigrants to become permanent residents within eight years and in the meantime apply for a "Lawful Prospective Immigrant" visa. Mr. Stevens and other White House officials declined to comment on details of the report.
Those details are similar to the statement of principles that the White House provided to reporters after Mr. Obama's Las Vegas speech. A fact sheet said the president wanted to strengthen border security, provide "earned citizenship," streamline legal immigration and crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
"Immigrants living here illegally must be held responsible for their actions by passing national security and criminal background checks, paying taxes and a penalty, going to the back of the line, and learning English before they can earn their citizenship," the fact sheet said.
In a statement late Saturday, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, criticized Mr. Obama, saying that the details reported in the USA Today article represent legislation that "is half-baked and seriously flawed."
"It would actually make our immigration problems worse," he said. Mr. Rubio, who has been among Republicans pushing for a comprehensive overhaul, predicted that a bill like the one reported would be "dead on arrival in Congress."
Mr. Obama's administration has been working on immigration legislation for years. But the issue shot to the top of the president's second-term agenda after his re-election in November, when Hispanic voters backed him in large numbers. White House officials are betting that Republicans will be eager to embrace immigration changes as a way of repairing their image with an important voting bloc.
But getting legislation passed remains tricky, especially in the Republican-controlled House, and Mr. Obama has made it clear he will take a back seat to lawmakers if it will help. Negotiations are taking place among a bipartisan group of senators, a separate group in the House, and among labor leaders and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, praised Mr. Obama's tone on the issue last week, saying the president "actually doesn't want to politicize this, which is conducive to getting something done."
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama met with Democratic senators at the White House to get a status report on the pace of progress on the legislation. In a statement, White House officials said Mr. Obama told them "he expects the process to continue to move forward and stands ready to introduce his own legislation if Congress fails to act."
It remains unclear, however, how long the president is willing to wait. In interviews with Spanish-language television stations after his speech last month, Mr. Obama suggested that he wanted to see real progress by March, when lawmakers had said they hoped to have an agreement.
"If they can get a piece of legislation debated on the floor by March I think that's a good timeline," he said on Univision.
"I'm not going to lay down a particular date because I want to give them a little bit of room to debate. If it slips a week, that's one thing. If it starts slipping three months, that's a problem."
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