Should They Stay Or Should They Go?

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For nearly as long as the U.S. has been a country, the question of who gets to be an American has stirred our passions and conflicted our values as few others have. In 1886, the same year that the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York harbor to the ideal of taking in the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, racist mobs rioted in Seattle and forced more than half the city's 350 Chinese onto a ship bound for San Francisco. That two chambers of Congress, both run by the same political party, should appear to be headed in such different directions on immigration tells you that the country is no less conflicted about the issue today. But the fact that for the first time in 20 years, lawmakers are even considering major legislation to do something about immigration shows there is one thing about which everyone can agree when it comes to the current system: it's broken.

The immigration overhaul in 1986 was supposed to have fixed the root problem of an uncontrolled influx by making it illegal for U.S. employers to hire undocumented workers and offering an amnesty to illegal immigrants who had been here for five years at that point. Instead, the best estimates suggest that since then, the number of illegal immigrants has more than tripled. Local governments are staggering under the costs of dealing with the inflow, and since 9/11, controlling who comes into the country has become a security issue as well.

The kind of comprehensive immigration reform being discussed by the Senate carries the potential of transforming the politics of the country by making citizensand therefore votersof millions of mostly Hispanic residents in relatively short order. Says McCain: "This legislation is a defining moment in the history of the United States of America."

And possibly in the history of the Republican Party, which helps explain why the politics of immigration is becoming so tricky for the G.O.P. The business interests in the party base don't want to disrupt a steady supply of cheap labor for the agriculture, construction, hotel and restaurant industries, among others. That's why business lobbyists broke into applause and embraced in the Dirksen office building as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 6 to send its bill to the Senate floor, with four of the committee's 10 Republicans joining all its Democrats in favor. So doubtful had been the outcome that there were gasps in the hearing room when Republican chairman Arlen Specter cast the final vote for it himself, giving the legislation extra momentum as it heads to the floor. But those same business interests had lost badly in the House, where social conservatives argued that illegal immigration has begun an uncontrolled demographic and cultural transformation of the country, threatening its values.