Scuttling toward sanity

David Brooks tells it like it is in today's New York Times:

I had a horrifying experience in the House of Representatives last week. The House Immigration Caucus held a press conference so members could compete to see who was the biggest blithering idiot in the group.

"Anybody who votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter, 'A for Amnesty!' " one aspiring idiot thundered. There's "a foul odor that's coming out of the U.S. Senate!" bellowed Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, who then went on to win the prize by suggesting that instead of using illegal aliens to harvest crops, we force felons to do it. "I say, Let the prisoners pick the fruits!"

Here was a seemingly mentally competent adult recommending that we force a largely minority population to go out in the fields and pick lettuce and cotton. You wanted to hit him over the head and scream: Is this ringing any bells, Representative Rohrabacher? Are we repealing the Emancipation Proclamation, too?

But this week the action moved over to the Senate, where pomposity generally has a restraining influence on stupidity. And indeed the major bill in the Senate, first conceived by John McCain and Ted Kennedy and refined by Arlen Specter, was immediately more sensible than anything that had emerged from the House.

The Specter bill acknowledged a few realities. First, a highly skilled nation like ours needs to import unskilled workers to do miserable jobs. Second, government is simply not powerful enough to hold off the global economy. You cannot build a wall around the United States that will successfully keep out the workers the U.S. economy demands.

The Specter bill balanced border enforcement with worker programs. It would build sluice gates regulating the flow of immigrants, not a wall.

But the Specter bill didn't have enough Republican support to pass. So an amazing thing happened. Senators tried to find a viable center.

Mel Martinez and Chuck Hagel forged a compromise proposal. McCain and Kennedy latched on. So did Bill Frist (who decided he'd swung too far over toward the anti-immigrant crowd) and the White House.

This proposal also recognized some realities, namely that the longer an immigrant is here, the more valuable to America he or she becomes. New immigrants are going through the shocks of assimilation. But veteran immigrants, even illegals, usually have excellent work records. They've put down roots. Their children are golden. These U.S.-born children go on to earn as much as children of natives, and pay taxes that compensate for the welfare costs of the first generation.

The Martinez-Hagel compromise would allow illegals who have been in the country five years to work toward citizenship, while imposing a higher hurdle for those who haven't. The measure was sufficiently tough to win support from 15 or so Republicans who couldn't support the Specter bill.

The Republicans were delighted with their progress, but then ran into trouble with the Democrats. At first they blamed the Democrats' lack of response on Harry Reid's desire to deny Republicans a victory. But then it became evident that the unions and other Democrats had leapt up to oppose the compromise because it might give legal status to illegal workers already here. The unions have a semilegitimate concern that large numbers of these workers lower wages for U.S. workers. This is probably true, but the effect is so modest that after thousands of studies, reputable economists have not been able to agree upon how much wages are reduced or even if they are at all.

Senate Democrats were also afraid that a half-baked Senate measure would be ripped apart in conference by Jim Sensenbrenner, the House negotiator who in past conferences has eaten senators for breakfast and cleaned his teeth with their bones.

What happened next is comprehensible only to devotees of the Senate. A trifling few differences about substance erupted into a furious disagreement about who would control the schedule on the floor.

As darkness settled last night, aides were boiling with frustration and ladling precriminations to me over the phone. Nobody could quite put their finger on exactly what was holding up a deal. And yet the Democrats might end up defeating a liberal immigration bill over a trifle.

"This is the sweet-spot deal," said the immigration expert Tamar Jacoby. "It makes moral sense. It makes practical sense. It's a little convoluted, but it's workable. If it fails, what a shame."

The House may be vulgar, but at least that body gets things done.