While it's safe to say that immigration reform won't happen this year, experts are divided over the prospect that congress will act in 2014, during an election year. At a recent immigration reform debate held at Rio Salado College in Temple, Ariz., nationally known immigration experts and advocates weighed in on the issue.

"I would be a crazy person to bet my house that it was gonna happen - I'm not foolish, but I also would not bet my house that it won't happen," said Tamar Jacoby, the CEO of Immigration Works USA, a federation of business groups that support reform, to the Fronteras Desk.

He continued, saying that House Republicans may be more willing to vote for immigration legislation once they know whether or not they will be challenged by another Republican in a primary during mid-term elections next year.

"If you don't have a challenger, you might feel freer to vote for this," Jacoby said. "So after the filing deadlines is a possibility, after the primaries is a possibility, lame duck is a possibility. It's going to be tricky, I mean let's be honest, the windows are small and they are going to be tricky to navigate."

Overall, Jacoby remains optimistic that the GOP will eventually vote on this issue.

"There is this will, there is a change of attitude in the Republican party," Jacoby said. "I think there is a chance we really could get to this."

One of the major points of contention over reform lies within dealing with the 11 million undocumented immigrants who currently reside in the country. While the bipartisan Senate bill that passed over the summer includes a pathway of citizenship, Republican leadership in the House has declared that they won't support it.

Jacoby says that more House Republicans are in favor of giving undocumented immigrants legal status that would allow them to work and travel, without becoming a citizen.

On the other hand, Derrick Morgan of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation said it was unrealistic to expect House GOP to vote for any proposal that would grant unauthorized immigrants legal status in an election year.

"A lot of people feel like in 1986 there was a legalization of about three million undocumented, unlawful immigrants at that time, and now we have about 11 million," Morgan said. "To do that all over again I think is too tall of an order for this Congress to do."

Rather, Morgan predicts that House members may resort to using a piecemeal approach to pass common sense legislation including amending the high tech visa programs and a proposal to track the exits of temporary visa holders.

Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute, disagreed, arguing that Congress has taken on immigration in an election year plenty of time over the course of history. "The last three big immigration reforms that have happened have happened during election years, 1986, 1990 and 1996," Nowrasteh said.

However, he warned that any unexpected problems in the New Year would take precendent over immigration.

Likewise, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., believes that reform will be addressed in 2014.

"We don't know when that will be," Goodlatte said, "but we hope it will be sometime next year," reports the NVDaily.com.

The League of United Latin American Citizens' Brent Wilkes pointed out that there are signs that House Speaker John Boehner may be willing to work on immigration next year. Earlier this month, Boehner's office announced that he has hired Rebecca Tallent, the former director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, as a consultant on immigration policy, reports USA Today.

"You've got, I think, some renewed strength on his part," Wilkes said. "He is certainly challenging the more conservative elements of his caucus, more so than he was willing to do before the shutdown."