WASHINGTON — With stirring speeches in English and Spanish, senior Democratic lawmakers unveiled their party's immigration reform blueprint Tuesday -- even though their presumptive presidential candidate, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, had taken no position on the far-reaching legislation.
"The question is, 'Where's Kerry?' " said Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Latino research center at USC. "It may be ... that he is worried about the backlash."
Immigration is a politically charged issue, especially when voters are uncertain about the economy.
The Democratic measure would offer a route to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants already in the country while setting limits on the future entry of foreign guest workers.
By contrast, President Bush has proposed a new guest-worker program -- with no numerical limits -- to fill jobs that Americans don't want. Illegal immigrants already here could register as guest workers for up to six years, but they would have no guarantees that they could obtain green cards leading to citizenship.
Democrats described their legislation as the product of months of negotiation with key interest groups representing immigrants, labor and business. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the proposal's co-author and a mentor to Kerry in the Senate, called it an issue of "fundamental fairness."
Kerry's aloofness is "certainly curious or peculiar," said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan policy center in Washington studying the movement of people worldwide.
A senior Kerry campaign official said that the candidate supported the concept of offering green cards to undocumented immigrants who were established, law-abiding workers, but that he had not yet decided whether he would endorse the Democratic measure.
"If comprehensive immigration reform passed the Congress this year, nobody would be cheering louder than John Kerry," said policy director Sarah Bianchi. "We're reviewing the details of the bill, but have long supported comprehensive immigration reform along these basic principles."
Democratic sources said the Kerry camp was reluctant to sign on to specific bills that could be "picked apart" by Republicans. But immigrant advocates say they expect the candidate to define where he stands.
