Immigration bill is worthy of praise

Throughout the United States, but particularly in California and the states of the Southwest, millions of foreign workers pick the crops, build houses, cook and serve in the fast-food restaurants, work as janitors and sometimes as nannies for American children. Most of them come from countries below America's southern border, particularly Mexico. Many of them are in the United States illegally.

From time to time U.S. immigration agents catch some and deport them. But it is an ineffectual process because there are too few agents and some 12 million immigrants who have broken laws to work and live in the United States where they enjoy better lives than in their original homelands. Even if they could all be found and captured, shipping them home is clearly impractical. Some have been in the country for many years, producing children who are American citizens by virtue of being born on American soil. And there is the interest of their employers, who pay them less than American workers would require and are loath to see them go. The agricultural industry in California, for example, would come to a standstill without these low-paid workers at harvest time.

It is a messy situation, which previous federal and state agencies have been unwilling or unable to solve. Border control has been laughable, but the porousness of the border today when terrorists may be seeking to infiltrate across it is not funny.

The existence of large numbers of workers in the United States who have circumvented immigration laws is a huge emotional problem with many voters and, therefore, a huge political problem for legislators. That is why the current efforts of a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators should be lauded and supported. After much labor they have produced a draft bill that addresses both the need to effectively control the U.S. southern border and the need to legalize the presence of foreign workers, both present and future, on American soil. If it, or a reasonably modified version of it, becomes law, it will be a major achievement and the most dramatic revision of immigration laws in decades.

The bill is being debated in the Senate, with debate in the House yet to come. President Bush, whose efforts to reform immigration laws were thwarted by the 9/11 attack, is for it. Both the liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal, rarely political bedfellows, see merit in it but want various aspects of it refined.