Boxer's vote switch helps revive immigration bill

The Senate's mammoth immigration overhaul was resurrected Tuesday in a big test vote -- aided by a reversal by California Sen. Barbara Boxer -- but the strange alliance of business, unions and ethnic groups supporting the effort is increasingly fractured.

The tensions are nowhere more evident than in Boxer's shaky role as a Democrat who a month ago split with her California colleague, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, to kill the bill, and on Tuesday rejoined her party in a 64-35 vote to let it move forward to the Senate floor for debate.

"I'd say it's a pretty good pounding from all directions," Boxer said. "People are strong on both sides. ... Constituents have opinions, labor has opinions, the Hispanic groups and other immigrant groups are split."

Boxer said her decisions on final passage later this week ride on two dozen highly controversial amendments affecting everything from H-1B visas for skilled workers to family green cards.

Her biggest complaint is a proposed guest worker program that would admit 200,000 unskilled workers a year for up to three two-year stints, each punctuated by a year out of the country. Boxer is proposing to subtract one guest worker from the quota for each one that fails to go home.

"As I decide, it will be based on my feelings about the whole issue, and what is in the best interests of my state and my country," Boxer said. "I know that sounds very corny, but that's really where it's at."

Feinstein, who helped negotiate the legislation and remains an ardent supporter, said she has received over 100,000 calls and letters on the issue.

"Have we gotten a lot of heat? Yes," Feinstein said. But she said it is hard to tell in a state as large as California whether that sample of mostly hostile opinion reflects a majority. Feinstein said she believes, "people understand we have an amnesty now" with millions of people living in the country illegally.

Silicon Valley technology companies were fighting their own battles behind the scenes, spurning White House entreaties to help push the larger bill until they are assured passage of an amendment by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to increase H-1B visas and allow employers to continue to sponsor some permanent migrants for five years.

The industry was horrified when the bill emerged from closed-door talks not only without the big increase in H-1B temporary visas for skilled workers they have sought for three years, but also eliminating employer-sponsored green cards for permanent residence with a merit-based point system.

The administration called 30 tech lobbyists to the White House on Monday to solicit their support, but got a limp handshake.

"A month ago, the same people said we shouldn't even get the Cantwell amendment," one said, speaking anonymously for fear of alienating the White House. "The president said, 'This bill is great and we don't want you to fight it.' Now they're saying, 'What a great amendment, we have helped get this for tech, and we support it.' "

The lobbyist said that was all well and good, but that high-tech muscle was riding entirely on their own provisions.

"We love them and want to work with them," the lobbyist said, "but our fate will be determined on the Senate floor and that's where our fight will be."

The technology provision remains caught in the swirl of backroom deal-making and arm twisting that delayed further progress on the bill throughout the afternoon. Cantwell said her amendment was being "used as bait" by Republicans trying to get Democratic votes for their tougher enforcement amendments.

Divisions within business, labor and immigrant rights groups have only grown over the past weeks. This unstable alliance has provided the muscle for every major immigration reform of the last four decades, and this one is no different.

But this time, with a bill hammered out secretly by a bipartisan group of senators and the White House, each faction felt left out in the cold. As the compromises pile higher, the cracks widen.

The more liberal of California's senatorial duo, Boxer is under greater pressure from unions and ethnic groups, who themselves are divided. Several Bay Area immigrant organizations -- the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition and others -- split off from the national lobbies, arguing that the enforcement-heavy bill is akin to apartheid.

National groups, such as the National Immigration Forum and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, have stayed on board, hoping to alter the bill later in the Democratic-controlled House.

The AFL-CIO, especially its construction trades, has split on immigration from the United Farm Workers union, hotel, restaurant, laundry and gaming workers union called UNITE HERE!, the Service Employees International Union and others with heavy immigrant memberships. UNITE's political director Tom Snyder is delighted that Boxer has come around, so far.

"Our California-based locals and leadership did reach out to her after that vote," Snyder said. "The opportunity, which won't return for many, many years, to legalize 10 million undocumented immigrants is essential to the future of the American workplace. You can't have that many people undocumented and have a workplace that's good from a union's standpoint."

Fractures among Democrats have been obscured by the ferocious fight between GOP conservatives and the White House.

Newly elected Democratic moderates such as Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri oppose an expansion of immigration. Pro-union liberals like Boxer worry that large numbers of low-skilled immigrants are putting pressure on wages.

Many Democrats and their immigrant allies are torn between the prospect of legalizing the estimated 12 million people living in the country illegally and GOP provisions that they loathe: the guest worker program and a new skills-based point system that would gradually replace extended family ties as the main basis for admitting new immigrants.

Republicans wrestle with trade-offs between legalization and a big boost in enforcement, not just at the border but at the workplace, sweetened with $4.4 billion in up-front money Bush promised.

Feinstein and Boxer both badly want long-languishing provisions to admit farmworkers and allow children brought illegally to the United States to gradually legalize their status, receive in-state college tuition, travel freely and get driver's licenses.

"There's a lot in the bill that's really good and a lot in the bill that's not good," Boxer said.