Immigration deal already appears to be unraveling
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

(05-22) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The powerful interest groups whose backing is critical to an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy are fracturing over the new bipartisan "grand bargain" in the Senate, setting up a brawl over changes that could tear the fragile deal apart.

Many business groups and ethnic lobbies for years have provided the political muscle behind the move to legalize the estimated 12 million people now living in the country illegally, create a giant new temporary worker program for future workers and expand the H1b visas for skilled immigrants eagerly sought in Silicon Valley. But they are deeply unhappy with the compromise among conservative Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona, liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and President Bush.

Add to that the withering fire from conservatives, a tepid welcome from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's faint praise of the bill as a "starting point," and what has been billed as a "grand bargain" on immigration appears to be unraveling before the debate even begins.

If the bill fails, all sides agree it could be years -- 2009 at the earliest, after next year's presidential election -- before another effort would be made to toughen the border and find some resolution to the problem of the 12 million people living in the country illegally.

The deal's defenders concede that the pact does not please everyone, but they warn both sides against leaving the problem to fester.

Kyl said his Arizona constituents wonder why he would sit down with Kennedy, a longtime liberal on immigration. Kyl said doing nothing was not an option and that if he hadn't worked with Kennedy, his conservative ideas would not have made it into the bill.

Kennedy's hopes that the Senate would vote on the proposal by the end of this week to avoid more criticism over the Memorial Day holiday were quashed by Senate leaders. Although the Senate voted overwhelmingly, 69-23, to proceed to debate, Senators in both parties are eager to amend the enormous legislation, which still in draft form is nearly 400 pages long. Most senators saw it for the first time last week after more than two months of closed-door, bipartisan negotiations.

The compromise attempts to reconcile profoundly conflicting positions on immigration, which accounts for the fire it is taking from left and right.

Conservatives want more border control and are alarmed at the enormous numbers of immigrants now arriving on U.S. shores both legally, about 1.3 million, and illegally, estimated at 400,000 a year. Liberals and business and ethnic immigrant groups want legalization for those already here and a path to permanent residency for future workers.

Yet businesses that have been pushing hard for expanding legal immigration are deeply divided and unhappy even over a new merit-based point system intended to raise the skill level of immigrants.

California farmers who have sent delegation after delegation to Washington complaining of fruits and vegetables rotting in the fields are among the few who are happy. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., insisted that the deal include a new visa program for 1.5 million farmworkers, known as AgJobs, that has been stalled in congress for several years.

But Silicon Valley's high-tech community is furious at the bill's H1b provisions for skilled workers, even though they appear to expand the number of temporary visas from the current 85,000 to as many as 180,000 eventually.

That's because the bill includes some severe restrictions urged by H1b opponents, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that would crack down on outsourcing companies in India using the visas for their U.S. operations and would add extensive compliance measures that H1b advocates call unworkable.

Low-wage service industries don't like the temporary worker program because workers would have to go home for a year after every two-year stint and could stay only a total of six years.

Pro-immigration groups and many Democrats also oppose such a plan, warning that it would create a "permanent revolving underclass" of low-wage workers with no incentive to assimilate and lead to a new illegal immigration problem if people do not return home. They want a path to permanent residence for temporary workers, but Kyl has been adamant for months that "temporary means temporary."

Business also is unhappy with the new point system designed to increase the overall skill and education level of new legal immigrants. Employers prefer to select the individuals they hire rather than draw from a generic pool of workers.

Leading immigrant groups oppose the point system because it would reduce extended family migration. Although some have held their fire, hoping to amend the legislation as it goes forward, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens and many grassroots immigrant groups have urged the bill's defeat.

"Family reunification has been the cornerstone of our nation's immigration policy since 1965, when the U.S. government replaced discriminatory quotas that excluded Asian immigration for generations," said Stanley Mark, senior staff attorney for the Asian American fund. "The proposal would eliminate basic family categories that Asian Americans rely on to reunite their families. If enacted, such a policy would have devastating impacts on Asian Americans, whose families already face some of the longest delays."

But Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who is strongly opposed to "chain migration" of extended families and has pushed hard for a point system based on skills and merit, said the Senate bill does not go nearly far enough.

The point system would not really start to affect future migration for eight years -- two presidencies and four Congresses -- after the long backlogs for relatives seeking green cards are processed.

Sessions said the point system was like bait for conservatives, and "We all bit it, and it's not there."

Still, the forces that propelled negotiators toward a deal are not going away. Voters are angry over mass illegal crossings, but at the same time are eager to find a more reasonable resolution than deportation of the 12 million here illegally. Business lobbies and immigrant rights groups alike are worried about recent raids on employers by federal immigration agents. The question is whether compromise is less palatable than a status quo that has become unacceptable to both sides.

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