Sun, Jul 1, 2007 (7:05 a.m.)

It can be seen now that the immigration bill that the president and Congress spent so much time debating over the past two years was doomed from the start.

The final collapse was Thursday in the Senate, when 37 Republicans, 15 Democrats and one independent voted against allowing the bill to proceed.

From the start we had mixed feelings about the bill. We support a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the United States. But the way the path was blazed in the bill - forcing people back across the border and then processing them back through in a tangled process that could take eight years - was unworkable.

Other aspects of the bill, including its guest-worker programs, were also laden with hardship for the immigrants whose hard work has enabled American consumers to enjoy lower prices on food and other products for decades.

Yet it was the best bill that politically could be fashioned considering the far-right extremism championed by demagogues on talk radio. In this milieu, most Republican senators and even some Democrats turned their backs on the legislation.

We had hoped that during debate on the bill, its unworkable aspects would have become obvious and that it would have been amended to reflect reality.

But as it stands, federal immigration policy - flawed from every standpoint - will likely remain unchanged. The effect will be felt most heavily by the Republican obstructionists.

Given their irrational and heated objections to "amnesty," they stand to lose much support from Hispanics, a group that now represents a swing vote.

And we do not believe that a majority of Americans want to see armed federal agents sweeping the country in pursuit of workers believed to be illegal. That is the only alternative to what the far right calls amnesty.

We hope American voters next year will send to Congress people who will be able to successfully cooperate on a comprehensive, and humane, immigration bill.

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