Senate passes immigration bill

WASHINGTON — The Senate, closing one round of acrimonious debate but setting the stage for another, passed legislation Thursday that would both tighten the borders to new immigrants and provide procedures for the 12 million foreigners already living in the U.S. illegally to gain legal status.

If enacted, it would trigger the biggest changes to U.S. immigration policy in decades, by strengthening border security, establishing a new guest-worker program and providing the means for millions of illegal immigrants to stay in the country and possibly become citizens.

The bill, which passed 62-36, now goes to a committee of House and Senate members, who will try to forge a compromise between the Senate legislation and a much more punitive bill approved by the House in December.

The task may prove impossible. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said this week that he would not schedule a compromise bill for floor action unless it commanded the support of a majority of the House's Republican majority.

"If Speaker Hastert insists on the 'majority of the majority,' " Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said this week, then the immigration initiative is dead.

The product of a tenuous bipartisan coalition that faced tough conservative opposition, the measure calls for 370 miles of triple-layer fencing along the Mexican border, a complicated three-tier system for determining who can stay and who must leave the country, and more jail cells for those awaiting deportation. It would declare English the country's national language, a gesture that many advocates found insulting but accepted in hopes of helping millions of undocumented workers achieve legal status.

Democrats and Republicans alike said a House-Senate accord will be nearly impossible without the vigorous involvement of President Bush, who favors an approach similar to the Senate's. The White House has already begun lobbying efforts, but it faces resistance from more than 200 House Republicans seeking re-election this fall, many in districts where the sentiment against illegal immigrants runs high.

"This is the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history," Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., a leader of the Senate effort, said of its passage.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Kennedy's partner in the effort, said more than 11 million illegal immigrants "harvest our crops, tend our gardens, work in our restaurants and clean our houses. ... Some Americans believe we must find all these millions, round them up and send them back to the countries they came from. I don't know how you do that. And I don't know why you would want to."

The House in December passed a bill that dealt only with border and workplace enforcement. It would make illegal presence in the country a felony.

Following mass demonstrations by immigrants in several cities and complaints by Catholic officials — plus Bush's recent televised speech calling for a comprehensive approach that would include pathways to legal status for undocumented aliens — House GOP leaders signaled a willingness to modify their bill. But they said the Senate bill goes too far and would amount to "amnesty," a term that many dispute, for millions of foreigners who broke the law and jumped ahead of would-be immigrants waiting for legal entry.

Critics on the left and right call the bill — and especially its three-tier formulation — unworkable. The notion of apprehending and deporting 2 million illegal immigrants who have been in the United States less than two years defies logic, some say. They add that the task would be six times greater under the House proposal to empty the nation of all illegal immigrants.