The comprehensive immigration bill is now dead. And the senators who killed it have reams of principled reasons for putting a bullet through it. What's less clear is if they are willing to shoulder the responsibility for the years of hardship and suffering they have now foisted on the immigrant community.

Whatever reaction those senators were expecting from the illegal immigrant community, the reaction that came has been sorrow.

In California, the country's most popular Spanish-language talk show host — Piolin — fielded call after call from tearful mothers until he himself choked up. To a person, those mothers were worried about their children, many of whom are full citizens of the United States of America for having been born here.

Those American children have now been condemned to the shadows of society. Perhaps all those dancing on the grave of immigration reform should put some of that high-stepping energy into helping those families.

In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon was melancholy but diplomatic.

"All the United States Senate did was heighten the risk and insecurity on both sides of the border," he told the Mexican press corps.

Clarissa Martinez, the director of a major immigration reform group, told the Spanish-language television audience, "The politicians speak lovely words to us in an election year, but they lack the courage to follow up and act."

All that has changed is that the issue is now muddier than ever. Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" claims the senators who killed the bill will probably find that vote haunting them for years to come. And though it sounds harsh, some pundits feel that — as with Gov. George Wallace and segregation — senators such as our own Orrin G. Hatch have landed on the wrong side of history. Senators stood, for a moment, at the crossroads of a nation. Their knees buckled.

Novelist Wallace Stegner once said that the Southern states have produced so many gifted writers because the South feels a need to work through its sins against humanity.

If that's true, perhaps America's skittish senators will themselves end up winning the Nobel Prize — not for peace, but for literature.