

In Washington, lawmakers in both parties use a similar strategy when piecing together immigration reform proposals. They throw in an inflammatory item that they know will be controversial so they can deflect everyone’s attention away from the really crucial element of the proposal. Americans fall for this trick every time. We’re largely ignoring what we should be talking about. And what we think is important really doesn’t matter much.

What does matter to politicians? You already know the answer. It’s always about the money. Democrats get money from labor and Republicans get it from business. Those are the interests that are going to be protected.

In the Senate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposes doing four things: building a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants; improving legal immigration by making it easier to retain high-skilled immigrants; tightening restrictions and penalties on employers to prevent them from hiring illegal immigrants; and creating a temporary guest worker program for the agricultural industry.

In the House, another bipartisan group is working on a similar piece of legislation.

And finally, the White House is now circulating a draft of its own immigration proposal, which seems to take a harder line than expected. The plan would give illegal immigrants the chance to escape deportation by becoming a “Lawful Prospective Immigrant.” But immigrants would still have to apply for such status and not have it granted automatically, as some reformers demand. Nor would the path to a green card be as quick as the reformers would like; immigrants could get their documents in about eight years. Citizenship would take even longer. When all is said and done, we’re likely talking about 10-13 years for someone to go from illegal immigrant to U.S. citizen. That isn’t exactly like the express lane at the supermarket, no matter what critics say.

Naturally, the proposed pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants is all anyone is talking about. How long should it take? How difficult should it be?

Yet the real deal-breaker – the guest worker plan – is something that isn’t getting much attention. The immigration debate doesn’t revolve around border security or what restrictionists call “amnesty.” It revolves around the idea of bringing into the United States a few hundred thousand temporary foreign workers to do what George W. Bush used to call “jobs that Americans won’t do” – primarily on farms and ranches.

For politicians, guest workers are where the money is. Labor wants to kill the idea, and business wants to save it. And both sides are prepared to spend a fortune to get their way. Negotiations between the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are going nowhere. Neither side will budge on the issue of guest workers.


