Capitol Hill closes in on immigration reform

But critics say the stepped-up enforcement is aimed more at finding votes on Capitol Hill than ferreting out wrongdoers. "The Bush administration is pursuing a spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes amnesty. "It is transparently an effort to provide political cover for House members to vote for an amnesty. Nobody believes that this enforcement will continue beyond the ink drying on the bill."

Both the House and Senate bills that passed in the last Congress stepped up border security, including a fence along hundreds of miles of the border with Mexico. But lawmakers were not able to agree on a guest-worker plan or whether to include a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally.

Until recently, only a handful of lawmakers were in the inner circle working on the shape of a new bill: Sens. Edward Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts and John McCain (R) of Arizona and Reps. Jeff Flake (R) of Arizona and Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois.

Many lawmakers, including Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained about being left out of the process. "I asked to be part of the process, and I was rebuffed," said Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas, a presidential hopeful who backed last year's bipartisan immigration bill.

"It isn't a draft yet. When it is, others will have a chance to participate," says an aide to Senator Kennedy.

But in recent days, even key players like Senator McCain have expressed concerns that negotiations have been protracted and difficult. In recent weeks, McCain has taken a hammering on the primary trail for his support of the war in Iraq and last year's McCain-Kennedy bill, which is opposed by GOP conservatives.

In South Carolina this weekend, McCain told a rally that the US needed a temporary work program to help secure the borders but that workers would need to go back home.

Questioned on whether relations with his cosponsor were in trouble, Kennedy said last week: "We have made real progress, and if there is any difficulty, we can go back to the bill we all passed last year."

But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say that reformers face an uphill climb to match last year's Senate vote, which passed by a vote of 62 to 36.

Several of the freshmen who helped Democrats take back the Senate campaigned against amnesty for illegal workers.

Sen. Jon Tester (D) of Montana says that he is waiting to see the new legislation but that he would have voted against the 2006 Senate bill. "I don't think the country has wanted to solve the problem, and I don't think it wants to now," he said in an interview last week. "Government needs to secure the borders first and then work on enforcing the laws that we have."

"We'll need a significant number of Republican votes, and we're going to need the president," says Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

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