After years of fits and starts, immigration reform finally looks as if it’s about to pass. The latest proposal is backed not only by the usual upscale Democrats and Chamber of Commerce Republicans, but also by Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, pro-labor Democrat Sherrod Brown, and the AFL-CIO. Conservative Republicans favor reform because they realize the party can’t ignore the growing Hispanic vote. And the unions are hopeful of recruiting new members and accommodating a growing constituency within their ranks.

Many observers think this is exactly how politics is supposed to work. But bipartisanship in Washington has its own unfortunate tendencies, namely a bias toward the interests of the rich and powerful. We saw this in financial reform, and now we’re seeing it again with immigration. To their credit, the Obama administration and the Senate negotiators have tried to fashion a bill that addresses the plight of eleven million undocumented immigrants while protecting citizens from undue job competition. But the proposal still puts the onus of sacrifice primarily on undocumented immigrants and low-income citizens, while exempting businesses and the wealthy. The bill reaffirms political scientist E. E. Schattschneider’s adage that American pluralism invariably “sings with an upper-class accent.”

Just look at the tortuous way the bill deals with immigrants’ access to the Affordable Care Act. The bill denies health insurance coverage to the eleven million undocumented workers, who will become “registered provisional immigrants” (RPIs), and to over 100,000 guest agricultural workers (who will get “blue cards” rather than “green cards”). Only after immigrants become permanent residents, which in the case of the eleven million undocumented will take a minimum of ten years and as long as 15 years, will they become eligible for Obamacare.

This is obviously bad health policy. Low-skilled immigrants who work in physically strenuous and polluted settings will be denied preventive coverage and treatment for chronic diseases, and if they acquire serious illnesses—tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, and several cancers are common among immigrant farm workers—they will have to go to sequester-squeezed emergency rooms.

But it’s also bad economics. It creates an incentive for employers to hire the new immigrants over citizens or green-card holders and to provide neither with health insurance. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with fewer than 50 workers do not have to buy health insurance for their employees, but businesses with 50 or more workers—which employ about three-quarters of American workers—either have to provide insurance or pay a fine for those workers who buy insurance through the exchanges the act creates. The fine is ordinarily $2,000 but can run as high as $3,000.