HBO Film Delves into Immigration Reform’s "Senators' Bargain"

They called it the "grand bargain." In mid-2007, Sen. Ted Kennedy struck a deal on immigration reform with conservative colleague Jon Kyl of Arizona. 

The inside story of Kennedy's all-out push to turn the agreement into law that year is told by "The Senators’ Bargain," a revealing new documentary produced and directed by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. 

The film will air March 24 on HBO2 (8 p.m. Eastern - reairing 11 p.m. on the West Coast) and March 26 on HBO Latino (6 p.m. Eastern - reairing 9 p.m. on the West Coast). 

The broadcast is ideally timed, since immigration reform is back on the national agenda and may emerge as a priority now that the White House can claim victory on health care. 

Just last week, Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., proposed a new bipartisan immigration reform plan. An immigration reform rally on the National Mall Sunday attracted 200,000 immigrants and their supporters. 

The political game of chutes and ladders the Schumer-Graham proposal will have to traverse in the months ahead is vividly depicted in "The Senators’ Bargain." 

The documentary is a kind of case study in immigration politics. Through it, Camerini and Robertson manage to break open the black box surrounding the back-story to major legislation. 

What's inside the box is an arcane world of closed-door meetings, book-length legislative blueprints, and bare-knuckled and profanity-strewn negotiations carried out to a large degree via phone and Blackberry. 

And increasingly in this world, immigrants and the children of immigrants aren't just the subject of negotiations, but the protagonists of deal making. 

"The Senators’ Bargain" contrasts with many documentaries about immigration because it focuses not on the world of the U.S.-Mexico border or ethnic neighborhoods, but the drab Washington, D.C. cubicles, offices and conference rooms where policy is made. 

"There's a traditional way of making a film about immigration, which is to concentrate on a group of immigrants, and show that immigrants are just like you, or that they're wonderful," said Camerini, in an interview with New America Media. "This film is full of immigrants who are players in the game of democracy." 

One of the documentary's key figures is Esther Olavarria, a Cuban immigrant and former immigrant rights advocate in Florida who became Sen. Kennedy's main staffer for immigration policy, and tirelessly tinkers with the bill as political considerations pile up. 

Also playing a role is Clarissa Martínez, immigrant advocate with National Council for La Raza. As support for Sen. Kennedy's bargain splinters, Martínez talks poignantly in a meeting with Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., of her relatives' own experiences living as undocumented immigrants. 

Much of the documentary's poignancy and dramatic tension derives from how advocates like Martínez had to hold their nose to support a bill that many of them had misgivings about. 

The bill blended get-tough border and interior enforcement, and a restrictive point-based system for future inflows of immigrants, with a path to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented already in the country. 

On the left, many immigrant advocates and policy-makers believed Sen. Kennedy had given up too much. The point system, in particular, was seen as a throwback to the pre-1960s days when immigration was determined by a discriminatory system of national quotas tilted toward Europe. 

On the right, critics howled that the plan amounted to an "amnesty" for law-breakers who had entered the country illegally.