WASHINGTON — After massive nationwide street protests this weekend, the Senate is set to begin debate, for the first time in a decade, on the emotionally charged subject of immigration.
The Senate's deliberations, scheduled to start Tuesday and extend over the next two weeks, could reshape a national immigration system that is widely perceived as failing the foreigners who want to enter the United States, citizens who expect it to prevent illegal border crossings and employers who look to it for workers to fill jobs that many Americans refuse to do.
The senators will determine whether flaws in that system should be addressed solely with tough new criminal laws and stringent enforcement measures -- such as those found in a bill, passed by the House late last year, that triggered demonstrations Saturday from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Or they may choose to include programs that give employers access to a future flow of workers, as President Bush has urged, and allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status.
Their choices will provide a barometer of Bush's waning influence over a Republican Party increasingly on edge about midterm elections. Their debate is likely to not only color the meeting between Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox, in Cancun, Mexico, later this week, but also to lay bare the fractures that the issue creates within the GOP on social, economic and security grounds.
The issue pits two of the party's core constituencies against each other, with social conservatives insisting on tough enforcement and the need to protect American culture and the business lobby calling for a reliable source of labor.
Even as immigration has divided the GOP, it has also allowed several of the party's 2008 presidential hopefuls to position themselves for campaigning in the months to come.
Whatever legislation emerges from the Senate would have to be reconciled with the House bill before it could reach the president's desk to become law, but the divisions are so deep that many wonder whether immigration reform will get that far.
"The challenge isn't so much what happens in the Senate, it's in that conference committee with the House," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), co-sponsor of a leading bill with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), said in an interview Sunday.
"The risk that's out there is that the Senate's version is so vastly different than what the House will accept, or they feel we're not serious about security issues, that it won't get to the president's desk," Cornyn said.
