Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., predicted Monday the immigration bill supported by President Donald Trump will not reach the necessary votes to pass the Senate.
"That bill's not going to pass," Rubio told CBS4 in Miami. ". . . I think the White House knows that you don't have 60 votes for that in the Senate."
"It actually has elements of it that were part of the 2013 proposal," Rubio said of the bill, which he worked on, that passed the Senate but not the House. That legislation also included a points-based system for immigration.
"In 2013, the very controversial Gang of Eight, four Democrats and four Republicans, proposed moving legal immigration to a merit-based system," he added. "It wouldn't be entirely merit-based, but it would be more merit-based, and it has to be in the 21st century."
When asked about what such a system would mean for immigrants like Rubio's parents, who had worked low-skill jobs once they came to America in the 1950s, he said, "When my parents came here in 1956 we had a very different economy. We had an economy that had a plethora of low-wage, low-skilled jobs. That's not the case anymore and our immigration system needs to reflect it. Our laws always are adjusted for the era in which we lived in."
He added, "I don't want to limit legal immigration, I certainly want to change the way we conduct it. Where I probably have a big difference of opinion with this bill is that it sets an arbitrary cap on the number of people that are able to come through with a green card. I don't think that should be an arbitrary cap, that number should be driven by demand."
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