A Stonewalled Migrant Bill

Few projects in the current deeply divided Congress have had the support of 63 senators, including 27 Republicans and 12 committee chairmen, only to still end up blocked by the Senate majority leader.

Yet that’s just what Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) did this month with a modestly useful little immigration bill. Fearing a reaction from the extreme conservative wing of the GOP, the White House asked the measure’s sponsor, Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), not to offer it up. And for good measure, it asked Frist not to let it come to a vote if Craig did present it.

Needless to say, the measure died.

Last week, speaking at a Latino gathering, Bush called for immigration reforms including a guest-worker program and “a system that would grant legal status to temporary workers who are here in the country working.” He might have been talking about the bipartisan measure he had just worked so hard to kill.

Craig’s measure was cosponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.); a companion measure in the House was offered by Reps. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood) and Chris Cannon (R-Idaho). The proposal would grant about 500,000 foreign farmworkers currently in the U.S. legal permanent residence, though not citizenship, if they continued to work for a certain time in agriculture. It also would provide for an updated guest-worker program, allowing others to enter and leave the country legally.

No industry is more dependent on foreign labor than agriculture, and no state is more dependent on agricultural labor than California. An estimated 80% of the workers in the field today are undocumented. The existing guest-worker program is regarded as too cumbersome and bureaucratic for seasonal labor.

Craig has announced that he will submit the bill again before Congress adjourns this fall. Bush should reconsider his opposition, given his appeals to Latino voters.

There are humane as well as business reasons to pass Craig’s S 1645. Heavier border enforcement after 9/11 has turned off the old circularity of immigration that allowed field workers to harvest the crops, go home and come back. More than 300 people died last year trying to illegally cross the border from Mexico.

With 8 million to 12 million undocumented people in the United States, there is also a security need to know who they are, where they are from and something about their backgrounds.

Farmers, unions and workers made a concerted effort to reach agreement on this measure and succeeded. The president shouldn’t be the one breaking up that consensus.