At its core, the fundamental problem of the Gang of Eight's legislation is that it thinks it has arrived at the country's national interest by a secret process of narrow-gauge bargaining among special interests. It has not.
Large businesses want a reliable supply of cheap labor beyond the one million-plus new immigrants that the country already admits every year. So they bargain for tens of thousands more low-skill "guest workers". There is however, nothing temporary about these workers since they will be able to apply for green cards.
High-tech businesses want a reliable supply of those trained in the fields (generally science, technology, engineering, and math, aka STEM) that support their business needs. They support simply giving a green card to every foreign graduate of an American college or university that majors in STEM areas.
Union organizations resist the "guestworker" proposal because they don't want to hurt the economic interests of their union members by making them compete with foreign workers who would be willing to work for lower wages. Their position validates the concern that importing large numbers of low-skill workers does in fact drive down wages for that group of Americans. On the other hand, unions want many more immigrants in the hope that they will replenish their diminishing union membership. The solution? Agree to more "guestworkers", but not in the work areas or in job titles in which union membership is already strong.
Replenishment of the faithful is also very much on the minds of the certain religious denominations as well. Clarion calls of religious conviction, and gimmicky manufactured events, like pushes for the new immigration bill reflecting the number of times "ger" ("stranger") is mentioned in the Bible, exist side by side with the largely unstated role that new legal immigrants and illegal aliens have in steadying, and in some cases reversing, declining church membership in some denominations.
To borrow a moment of candor from Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the chief religious advocates of the new legislation: "First and foremost, it's a kingdom issue, and, second, it's a moral issue. We have hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Southern Baptists and many of them are undocumented. … It's no secret that we practice aggressive evangelism. Many of these people were converted after they got here." Though I'm not sure what a "kingdom issue" is, it sounds as if recruitment self-interest has become entwined with morals.
Two of the Senate bill's sponsors congratulated themselves in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, for having, "engaged in hundreds of hours of very tough negotiations, which nearly broke down at several points." But whom did they negotiate with? We don't really know because the deliberations were kept secret, but we do know they didn't speak to all the groups that had a profound interest in the outcome.
Any time powerful, well-funded, and well-connected "stakeholders" like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the liberal Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO, and the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), and ethnic lobbies like La Raza come together for a deal, it is certain that each of them will get a preponderance of their policy wishes, subject to negotiation at the margins. And the American national interest and that of ordinary Americans will be presumed by these big stakeholders to be synonymous with theirs.
To state the obvious: That's not true.
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