Why the Immigration Bill Died in the Senate -- and Will Keep Dying

Last Friday, a small but vocal group of hardliners hijacked the national debate over immigration and, in all likelihood, derailed the effort to reform a system that Americans from across the political spectrum agree is dysfunctional. (George Bush has said he hopes to restart the negotiations, but most observers agree that a deal is not likely.)

The bill -- which began as a compromise that everyone hated -- was killed in the Senate, smothered under the weight of a flurry of unpopular amendments offered up by a small group of Senators, including some of the chamber's most reactionary, before the national debate was even under way.

The hardliners shot down the compromise before negotiations that might have made the bill widely palatable had begun in earnest, and they did so over the objections of the leading voices within their party and the White House. If the measure had gotten past them, hardliners in the House were standing by; The Hill reported last week that House conservatives were "ready to stop the Senate immigration bill in its tracks with a potent procedural weapon should the contentious measure win passage in the upper chamber."

The compromise's unexpectedly swift destruction reveals a little-discussed aspect of the immigration debate today: It is not an epic battle between America's two major parties, and it's not a grand clash of political ideologies. It is a debate between a supermajority of pragmatic Americans in both parties who favor a comprehensive approach to immigration control, and a small but extremely loud group of immigration hardliners who want a predominantly punitive approach to the issue -- with a focus on "enforcement" first and foremost -- and have proven that they will do whatever they can to obstruct any bill that allows undocumented workers who meet certain conditions to come out of the shadows.

Since round two of the immigration fight began, the hardliners' rallying cry has been "no bill is better than a bad bill." By last week, polls showed that many Americans, including some prominent progressives, agreed. But getting no bill means that millions of undocumented workers will continue to live on the margins. It means a patchwork of mean-spirited and ultimately pointless English-only laws and occupancy rules will be passed at the state and local levels, while a small number of communities continue to bear the costs of immigration for everyone, without any federal help, and it means keeping an ugly issue on the table for another year or two (or ten). It means more of the status quo; a few photo-op raids on employers, a few hundred million tax dollars going to Bush cronies to install some high-tech gizmos on the border and more Americans losing faith in D.C.'s ability to tackle problems -- the kind of "failure of government" stories that always help the right wing in the end.

Unfortunately, the media has decided that all sides were equally to blame for the death of immigration reform in this congress. The reality is very different.

Not as divided as many believe

As sharply divided as Americans are on the specifics of dealing with immigration, there's significant agreement on the broad principles of comprehensive reform. That fact is obscured by the intensity of the immigration hardliners' rhetoric and by the difficulty many progressives have internalizing the fact that a majority of Americans support a progressive approach to immigration control.

That's what the data show. For two years the issue has been subject to the most extreme demagoguery. Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have claimed repeatedly and wrongly that illegal immigrants are violent felons who take American jobs and depress American wages. For the past two years Michelle Malkin has argued that immigration is a Mexican plot to retake the Southwest. While interviewing Sen. John McCain last month, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly said that the latest immigration bill was supported only by "the far left" in order "to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, of which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have." "It's an invasion!" they cry.