Bush's immigration plan needs a chance
THE SANDIEGOUNION-TRIBUNE

If only Americans could devise a way to pair willing employers with willing workers, and free up the Border Patrol to go after terrorists and smugglers instead of people who come to do jobs that Americans aren't doing.

In a nutshell, that is the idea that sparked the latest installment of the perennial immigration debate.

It came from President Bush, who early in his presidency seized upon the idea of establishing a new guest-worker program to import temporary workers for industries where employers found it difficult to fill jobs with American workers.

A guest-worker plan is one of the components of the recently unveiled compromise immigration bill, which the Senate began to debate last week.

The plan is to bring in as many as 400,000 guest workers per year for two or three years, and then require those workers to go home for a year before they reapply to reenter the country.

This is a major component of the proposal, and certainly one of the most controversial aspects of the plan.

In fact, one of the few things on which critics on both the right and the left agree is that the guest-worker program is a non-starter, albeit for radically different reasons.

Many conservatives fear that the workers won't leave and that, as former Sen. Alan Simpson likes to say, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary worker. Meanwhile, many liberals are worried employers would exploit the guest workers and bring down wages for U.S. workers.

These are not trivial concerns, but they can be addressed through the amendment process, especially now that the Senate Democratic leadership has wisely abandoned its ill-conceived plan to ram through this important piece of legislation with very little debate.

It now seems clear that senators will be discussing the proposal for at least a week, and perhaps longer.

That is the best course. Senators need to use the time to address concerns about the guest-worker plan.

This isn't complicated.

There needs to be a series of punishments and incentives created to entice foreign workers to return to their home countries when their time in the United States is up.

And legal safeguards need to be put in place to protect workers from abuse and exploitation while they are here.

As for bringing down wages for U.S. workers, well, that assumes the native born want to do these jobs in the first place - even at the best of wages.

President Bush had the right idea from the beginning.

We need a program that pairs willing workers with willing employers and does so in a manner that is fair, just and humane to all parties.

Who knows? Perhaps this is just such a plan. We'll never know if we don't give it a chance.