Obama offering immigration plan as backup

The White House is downplaying its draft immigration proposal that leaked to the media over the weekend as merely a backup plan if lawmakers don’t come up with an immigration overhaul of their own. It won’t be necessary, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are telling the Obama administration. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said Sunday that President Barack Obama wants to “be prepared” in case the small bipartisan group of senators fails to devise a plan for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. In response, lawmakers assured the White House they are working on their own plan — and warned that Obama would be heading toward failure if the White House gets ahead of them. The immigration issue is the rare one with a decent chance of being approved by a bitterly divided Congress this year. The surge of interest in addressing the famously tangled immigration system, which languished as an issue during Obama’s first term, has come since the country’s growing number of Hispanic voters went strongly for Obama in last year’s election. Nervous Republicans who once talked up deportation are looking for alternatives instead.