Editorial: New way on immigration

Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2006 | 6:58 a.m.

Now that Democrats have been elevated to power in both houses of Congress, a workable immigration law is being drafted. It promises to be more rational than what came out of Congress when the Republicans were in charge.

The House in December 2005 passed a bill criminalizing undocumented immigrants, hitting businesses that hired them with steep fines and reimbursing local police departments for money they spent rounding up people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

The bill was too extreme and too impractical to be reconciled with a more reasonable bill in the Senate, where the views of moderate Democrats and Republicans prevailed.

Yet the Senate bill was also unrealistic. It divided illegal immigrants into three tiers, depending on how long they had been in the U.S. About 2 million would have been permanently deported, another several million would have been deported but allowed to apply for a green card, and all those who could prove they had been here at least five years would have been allowed to stay and apply for citizenship.

This plan could not have been adopted without adding thousands of federal employees and would have created a massive black market in documents falsely attesting to five years of residency.

The only accomplishment, it if can be called that, on the immigration front last year was for Congress to pass a bill in September calling for 700 miles of fencing between Mexico and parts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Even that bill, however, was flawed - no money was approved to fund the fence.

The new bill being drafted in the Senate does away with the three-tier plan. While newly arrived illegal immigrants would likely still face deportation, as many as 11 million of the estimated 12 million living in the U.S. would be able to stay and apply for citizenship, according to The New York Times.

Also, the Times reported, lawmakers are talking seriously about withholding money for the 700 miles of fencing.

Many of the most strident proponents of draconian anti-illegal immigration laws were voted out of office. Knowing that the voting public, which includes millions of Hispanics, doesn't support such intolerance as the House showed with its bill, Republicans now seem more willing to compromise with Democrats on a more moderate approach to immigration policy.

We believe in improvements to border security, not necessarily by way of a wall. And we believe in granting people who crossed the border illegally a path to citizenship, as long as their records are otherwise clean.

That Congress is planning a more sensible, less hysterical approach to immigration is heartening. We hope to see a bill pass in 2007 that is both workable and humane.