THE DEBATE about immigration reform is shifting dramatically, and with it the high-stakes negotiations between Democrats and Republicans that have been taking place for several weeks now in a backroom on Capitol Hill.
The good news: The fight over legalization, or "amnesty," is all but over. Even conservative Republicans intensely skeptical about a foreign influx are coming to understand that we as a nation can't solve the problem of illegal immigration without doing something about the 12 million illegal immigrants already here, and together they and Democrats are crafting a measure that would allow many of those workers to earn citizenship over time.
The not-so-good news: There is very little agreement among lawmakers about the much larger, more important issue of how to structure the immigration system going forward.
The system we have obviously does not work. Every year for years now, U.S. economic needs have drawn roughly 1.5 million foreigners -- workers and their families -- into the country. But we issue only about 1 million visas. It's as if we were making cars and had to import the steel, but our steel quotas provided only two-thirds of what we needed, and the other third had to be smuggled in for the economy to function at full capacity.
Illegal immigrants are merely a symptom. The real problem is the law that ignores the truth about our economic needs. And the critical question is whether Congress can own up to the reality of those needs and the real behavior of the foreign workers who come to meet them.
The last time legislators rewrote the immigration code, in 1986, they couldn't bring themselves to face the facts. They legalized that era's illegal population; they stipulated the need for a better, more realistic system and more effective enforcement. But they just couldn't bite the political bullet -- explaining to voters why we needed to raise our quotas by 400,000 to 500,000 new visas a year.
This time around, Congress appears a little more intrepid, and many lawmakers -- Democratic and Republican -- recognize the need for additional visas. But under pressure from organized labor, some Democrats are resisting, determined to limit the increase to 200,000 new permits. And an equally unrealistic faction of Republicans, though willing to admit an extra 400,000 workers a year, is insisting that they stay only temporarily -- that no matter how well they do in this country or what kind of roots they put down here, every single one of them must go home at the end of a three-year work stint.
