Frist might relent on immigration bill

WASHINGTON – With the Republican Party deeply divided, the Senate will take up a broad revision of the nation’s immigration laws today amid signs that conservatives are ready to compromise on efforts to offer illegal immigrants new avenues to lawful employment.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., will move forward with his legislation to bolster border security and toughen laws against illegal immigration without a guest worker program. But Frist agreed to allow Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to move quickly to substitute the more lenient bill that passed his committee Monday, and Specter appears to have more than enough votes to do so.

That bill would couple border security measures with provisions to allow millions of undocumented workers to apply for legal work visas and move toward U.S. citizenship, while offering hundreds of thousands of foreign workers access to the U.S. workplace.

The committee’s bill is a sharp break from the get-tough approach approved by the House in December, which rebuffed President Bush’s call for a guest worker program and focuses exclusively on border security and immigration law enforcement.

With voters clamoring for action and hundreds of thousands of immigrants marching against the House’s proposals, GOP leaders signaled a willingness to compromise. The committee’s bill, which largely mirrors legislation written by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., goes considerably further than Bush’s proposals, but after a meeting with the president, McCain declared, “I got the impression that he’s happy.”

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he hopes the Senate will pass what he called “a responsible border security bill,” but he indicated he is willing to rethink the House approach. After meeting with ranchers and law enforcement officers on the U.S.-Mexican border, Boehner said those living on the frontier did not believe the House-passed border strategy would work.

Under the Judiciary Committee bill, illegal immigrants who pay a $1,000 fine and back taxes would be able to apply for a three-year work visa, renewable for a second three-year period. In the fourth year of work, the visa holder could begin a five-year path toward citizenship. A second guest worker program would open up legal agriculture jobs to 1.5 million undocumented farmworkers.

The measure also would add as many as 14,000 border patrol agents by 2011 to the current force of 11,300 agents and would authorize a “virtual wall” of unmanned vehicles, cameras and sensors to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border.

Unlike the House bill, it would not make illegal immigrants and those who assist them into felons, nor would it authorize the construction of massive new walls along 700 miles of the southern border.