LAST OF FOUR PARTS.

On May 15, 2006, in a nationally televised speech, President George W. Bush challenged the Senate to pass an immigration overhaul bill within the month.

After describing his own plan for immigration reform, Bush noted that the House of Representatives had already passed a bill. “The Senate should act by the end of this month so we can work out the differences between the two bills, and Congress can pass a comprehensive bill for me to sign into law,” he said. The full text of his speech is here.

Thirteen months and 13 days later, hopelessly deadlocked, the Senate gave up. Most of Bush’s Republican allies had deserted him.

“Most of Bush’s Republican allies”: The June 28, 2007, motion to halt debate failed 46 to 53, 14 short of the 60 required. Voting in favor were 12 Republicans, 33 Democrats and 1 independent; voting against were 37 Republicans, 15 Democrats and 1 independent. For roll call, go here.

Underscoring immigration reform’s political toxicity, Sen. John McCain later disavowed the bill he had once championed.

“McCain disavowed”: During a Republican presidential candidates’ debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Jan. 30, 2008, McCain was asked if he would vote for the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, if it came to a vote on the Senate floor. His answer: “No, I would not, because we know what the situation is today. The people want the border secured first.” See the debate transcript here.

Now President Barack Obama is trying to honor his promise to reform immigration.

Obama outlined his plan in a July 1, 2010, speech at American University. For the text, go here.

It won’t be easy. Immigration reform never is. The last major immigration law, in 1986, drew on ideas proposed more than a decade earlier.

The centerpiece of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was workplace sanctions, or fines against employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Rep. Peter Rodino, D-New Jersey, first promoted the idea in a 1973 bill. A presidential commission endorsed it in 1981. See part 2 of this series for additional background.

Haunting the debate is the failure of the 1986 act to curb illegal immigration. The law granted legal status to most of the 3.2 million illegal immigrants who lived in the United States at the time. Nearly a quarter-century later, at least 10.5 million more illegal immigrants have settled here – exceeding the entire population of Michigan.

“Failure of the 1986 act”: See part 2 of this series. “At least 10.5 million”: The 1986 law legalized about 2.7 million of the 3.2 million illegal immigrants then estimated to live in the United States. See “Lessons from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986″ by Betsy Cooper and Kevin O’Neil, Migration Policy Institute, August 2005. The current estimated total is 11.1 million. See “Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2009,” Register compilation of estimates from Pew Hispanic Center, Congressional Research Service and Department of Homeland Security. “Exceeding the entire population of Michigan”: Michigan had 10 million residents in 2008; see “Native and foreign-born, all states, 1850-2008,” Register compilation of Census data.

When she signed her state’s immigration enforcement law in April, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called illegal immigration “a crisis we did not create and the federal government refuses to fix.”

Gov. Jan Brewer: Official text for her remarks is here.

The truth is more complex.

BROKEN SYSTEM

Over the past decade, Presidents Bush and Obama and successive Congresses have spent billions on the Border Patrol and prosecutors. Their two principal aims: block immigrants at the border and deport those already in jail.

For border, see “Border Patrol budget, 1980-2009,” Register compilation of data from Border Patrol, Senate Appropriations Committee and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. For prosecutions, see “FY 2009 federal prosecutions sharply higher,” Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University, Dec. 21, 2009.

Neither tactic sufficed. The illegal immigrant population grew by 500,000 a year for most of the past decade. It took the Great Recession to stem the tide.

“Illegal immigration estimates, 1986-2009,” Register compilation of estimates by Department of Homeland Security, Pew Hispanic Center and Congressional Research Service.

At its heart, the failure of the immigration system is economic: Employers want cheap labor. Illegal immigrants want jobs.

The demand for unskilled immigrant labor is nearly 20 times the legal supply. Some 7.8 million illegal immigrants, most of them unskilled, are working in the U.S.

“Nearly 20 times the legal supply”: About 200,000 unskilled workers were admitted in 2009 under the H-2A and H-2B programs; see “Nonimmigrant admissions, 1999-2009”. “7.8 million illegal immigrant” workers: see “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade,” by Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Hispanic Center, Sept. 1, 2010.

They far outnumber the immigration authorities. They always will, no matter how many more Border Patrol officers Congress authorizes.

“We need to fundamentally reform the system,” said James Ziglar, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 2001 to 2003. “There’s no magic bullet, whether it’s building a fence or having 100,000 Border Patrol agents.”

Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

Here are some reform strategies getting attention now:

BORDER SECURITY: Fortifying the Mexican border has been the central focus of immigration policy since the mid-1990s. And since then, the illegal immigrant population has more than doubled.

But putting more agents and more technology on the border is popular. The failed 2007 bill and pending legislation promised additional resources for the border. And both the old bill and the leading Democratic proposal contain a trigger: no immigrant-friendly reforms will take effect until the border is secure.

For official documents on the McCain-Kennedy bill, go here. Click on the “CRS Summary” link to read the Congressional Research Service summary. For the Democrats’ conceptual proposal go here.

The border-first emphasis is “a way of looking like you’re doing something about immigration,” said Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which campaigns for restrictions on immigration. “It’s sort of a default policy.”

Interview, Steven Camarota, Aug. 23, 2010.

• AMNESTY: Three words sank the 2007 bill: “path to citizenship.” The proposal would have granted legal status to most of the nation’s illegal immigrants if they registered and paid a fine. The Democratic plan contains a similar provision. Presidents Bush and Obama accepted the continued presence of illegal immigrants as inevitable. Both called for legalization. Obama said that deporting them “would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive.”

See Obama speech, July 1, 2010.

• WORKER ID CARD: During the debate over the 1986 immigration act, Congress rejected a proposal for a national identification card – a bugaboo for both the right and the left. Instead, it decided workers could use several existing forms of ID to establish they were in the nation legally and authorized to work.

“Lessons from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,” by Betsy Cooper and Kevin O’Neil, Migration Policy Institute, August 2005.

That didn’t work.

A tamper-proof Social Security card or a secure identity card is likely to be a key part of the next immigration law. The failed 2007 bill would have encouraged – and the current Democratic alternative would require – workers to present a secure ID whenever they start a new job. To defeat identity thieves, the card would carry a photo and biometric data such as fingerprints or an iris scan.

For a discussion of biometric IDs, see “The Next Generation of E-Verify: Getting Employment Verification Right,” by Doris Meissner and Marc R. Rosenblum, Migration Policy Institute, July 2009.

It will cost billions. In the late 1990s, when federal officials first began grappling with the use of fake IDs by illegal immigrants, the Social Security Administration estimated a tamper-resistant card would cost between $3.9 billion and $9.2 billion.

• MANDATORY E-VERIFY: E-Verify, the Web-based system for confirming people are authorized to work, has been voluntary since its inception in 1996. All the leading bills in Congress would make it mandatory. The agency that runs E-Verify, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, pegged the cost for a mandatory system at $765 million over four years if just new hires are screened.

E-Verify covers roughly one in every 10 U.S. employers – but a much larger share of the big employers. Close to a third of new hires this year went through an E-Verify check.

USCIS spokeswoman Mariana Gitomer, e-mail, Aug. 30, 2010. Some 219,000 employers representing 780,000 worksites – about 10 percent of the national total counted by the Census Bureau – are enrolled in E-Verify. From Oct. 1, 2009, through Aug. 14, 2010, they ran 14 million queries. The Government Accountability Office estimated a mandatory E-Verify would process 63 million queries each year. See “Employment Verification: Challenges Exist in Implementing a Mandatory Electronic Employment Verification System,” GAO-08-895T, June 10, 2008.

• GUEST WORKERS: America has two channels for importing labor. One is fast, cheap, responsive to employers – and illegal. The other is slow, expensive and usually requires a lawyer.

“It is critical not to lose sight of the fact that illegal immigration has a clear economic logic: It provides U.S. businesses with the types of workers they want, when they want them and where they want them.” See “The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration” by Gordon H. Hanson, Council on Foreign Relations, April 2007.

Both the 2007 bill and the leading Democratic proposal call for admitting hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to fill unskilled jobs. The idea is that these legal workers would displace illegal immigrants on the job.

• ‘DREAM’ ACT: More than 2 million illegal immigrants came to America as children. The DREAM Act – short for “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act” – would extend conditional legal status to high school graduates and green cards to those who complete two years in college or the military.

“DREAM vs. Reality: An Analysis of Potential DREAM Act Beneficiaries” by Jeanne Batalova and Margie McHugh, Migration Policy Institute, July 2010.

California’s version of the DREAM Act, passed by the Legislature in 2001, extended in-state tuition at the University of California and California State University to eligible illegal immigrants. But until they become legal residents, most can’t find jobs to match their education.

For more on the DREAM Act in California, see these sites covering its impact on the UC and Cal State systems.

• ‘AgJOBS’ ACT: Pushed by big farm interests and the United Farm Workers, the Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act would allow illegal immigrants who worked in the fields at least 150 days in a two-year period to legalize. They and their families would get temporary “blue cards” and eventually could become legal permanent residents.

The most recent version of the AgJOBS bill was introduced in May 2009 in the House by Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., and in the Senate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. For details, go here.

HARDER CHOICES

Those ideas have all found their way into pending legislation. But other, more controversial ideas could get traction – particularly if Congress stalemates and if illegal immigration begins growing again. Here are a couple of the most controversial ideas:

• DATA SHARING: If E-Verify doesn’t work, the government could turn to more intrusive ways of finding illegal workers. In a 2006 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office reviewed letting Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service share their databases with immigration authorities. The GAO warned that sharing the data “could involve divulging information about hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. citizens and work-authorized aliens.”

A milder form of data sharing – the Bush administration’s 2007 attempt to send employers “no-match” letters identifying workers whose information did not match Social Security records – provoked opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO. A federal judge halted the letters, and the Obama administration later gave up the idea.

No-match letters: See Federal Register, Oct. 7, 2009, for a brief history of the rule.

• ‘BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP’ REPEAL: The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States. Several Republican senators have proposed hearings to explore repealing birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Two House bills, including one introduced by Rep. Gary Miller, R-Diamond Bar, would try to do this by revising immigration law.

LEAVE Act, HR-994; for details go here.

There are 4 million U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants; the Miller bill, as written, would only apply to children born in the future.

“4 million U.S.-born children”: See “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States,” by Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Hispanic Center, April 14, 2009.

• LIMIT LEGAL IMMIGRATION: A million legal immigrants have entered the U.S. each year over the past 20 years – more than three times the rate during the 1960s. If the “jobless recovery” continues, the decades-old political consensus in favor of expanded legal immigration could break down.

GETTING TO ‘YES’

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both sought “comprehensive” immigration reform, a bill that would legalize millions of illegal immigrants, tighten enforcement and admit more immigrant workers.

Bush couldn’t persuade his fellow Republicans. Obama so far hasn’t been able to move the issue through the most Democratic Congress in decades. Whatever happens in the November election, the next Congress probably will be more Republican.

Tamar Jacoby sees potential for a comprehensive bill coming from a divided Congress. She heads ImmigrationWorks USA, a business group that favors increased immigration.

“No one in their right mind would be hopeful and rosy,” Jacoby said. But “both Democrats and Republicans have a big stake in getting immigration behind them before 2012.”

Interview, Tamar Jacoby, Aug. 27, 2010.

Democrats, she said, have to keep their promise to Latino voters to enact immigration reform; just trying won’t be enough. Meanwhile, “Republicans probably think there won’t be another Republican president until they get immigration off their demerit list with Latinos.”

As for her own group’s favorite cause, importing more labor, Jacoby admits it will be hard to get anywhere in the midst of a recession. But a flexible cap, one that admits few immigrants now but more when the economy booms, might pass, she said.

“Even in the worst of times, we need some workers,” she said. Even now, “people aren’t leaving Detroit … to clean toilets in hotels or pick fruit.”

Mark Krikorian heads the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors restrictions. He believes there is no chance for a comprehensive bill in the next two years.

“The core dynamic” of comprehensive bills was to trade legalization for the promise of stronger enforcement. The 2007 bill died, he said, because “nobody believes the promise of future enforcement.”

Interview, Mark Krikorian, Aug. 30, 2010.

That leaves “small ball” legislation, such as the DREAM Act and AgJOBS, Krikorian said. The first covers the most sympathetic group of illegal immigrants, the second a powerful interest group.

“Small ball may be what you want to do,” Krikorian said. “”When I hear the word ‘comprehensive,’ I grab my wallet and look for cover.”

AN UNEASY HISTORY

The United States has a long history of uneasy relations with its newest immigrants.

In the 1850s, the “Know Nothings” sought unsuccessfully to end the mass migration of Irish and German Catholics.

The “Know Nothings” drew their name from the answer members were supposed to give when asked about the movement: “I know nothing.” Organized as the American Party, it ran former President Millard Fillmore for president in 1856.

In the 1870s and the early 1900s, Californians persuaded the federal government to shut out Asian immigrants.

See part 1 of this series.

In 1924, having made their peace with the Irish and Germans, restrictionists slammed the door on Jewish and Italian immigrants.

The 1924 law set nationality quotas based on each sending country’s share of the U.S. population in 1890 — after the peak of the Irish and German immigration and before immigration from southern and eastern Europe took off. As a result, 70 percent of the annual quota was reserved for just three countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. See “Three Decades of Mass Migration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 1995.

In 1965, a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Rep. Emanuel Cellar of New York, co-authored the bill that welcomed a new wave of immigrants.

Mexicans have dominated that wave, accounting for nearly a third of all immigrants, legal and illegal, since 1990. Only two other ethnic groups in American history have dominated immigration to that extent: the Irish and the Germans in the 19th century.

“Mexicans have dominated”: Mexicans comprise about 32 percent of all current immigrants, legal and illegal; that compares to 33 percent for Irish from 1850 to 1870 and 26 percent for Germans from 1850 to 1900. See “Mexican Immigrants in the United States, 2008,” Pew Hispanic Center, April 15, 2009; see also “Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States” by Gordon H. Hanson, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12141, March 2006. See also “Highlights” spreadsheet of “Legal permanent residents by home country, 1820-2009” Register compilation of Yearbook of Immigration statistics data.

In time, Mexican immigrants and their descendants – like the Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians before them – will win political and economic power. For now, however, millions of them can only watch as Congress debates the broken immigration system and their future.

Since the collapse of President Bush’s immigration plan in 2007, attempts to broker a compromise have gone nowhere. People on one side advocate an enforcement-only approach, saying nothing else should be done until the border is finally secured. People on the other side say nothing can be done until the country accepts the presence of millions of illegal immigrants.

“Once polarization starts, it tends to be the opposite of a virtuous circle,” said Jacoby, the immigration advocate.

President Obama, she said, needs to stop attacking the Arizona immigration law and explain what he will do to improve enforcement. Republicans, she added, “need to be telling other Republicans, ‘Tone it down.'”

Krikorian, the advocate for restrictions on immigration, said that outside Washington the public has already adopted a calm, unpolarized stance – in favor of stronger enforcement.

Look at the changing public reaction to employer audits, Krikorian said.

In 1999, during the Clinton administration, senior Immigration and Naturalization Service official Mark Reed checked the immigration status of workers at several Nebraska meatpackers. The audit forced 3,500 illegal workers to flee, disrupting business and outraging Nebraska officials. Reed, the INS and the Clinton administration ducked for cover.

For Reed’s account of the 1999 Nebraska audits, see part 2 of this series.

Fast-forward 10 years. In the summer and fall of 2009, the Obama administration sent audit notices to nearly 2,000 employers. It was orders of magnitude bigger than Reed’s brief one-state, one-industry campaign. Yet few objected.

“The center of gravity has clearly moved toward more enforcement,” Krikorian said. “Things that were unacceptable in the past clearly are within the pale now.”

Reed, a consultant now, thinks a crackdown on employment could push millions of illegal immigrants home.

“They came here to work,” Reed said. “So you don’t (need to) arrest anybody. This is all about jobs.”

Interview, Mark Reed, Sept. 24, 2009.

But James Ziglar, the former INS commissioner, said an enforcement-only approach won’t work.

“Until we reform our laws with regard to how people get here and how long they stay, we will never get control of immigration,” Ziglar said. “You can put all the guards, all the fences you want at the border, and you can do all the worksite enforcement you can, and you will still have illegal immigration.”

Interview, James Ziglar, Feb. 9, 2010.

Contact the writer: 714-796-5030 or rcampbell@ocregister.com