The collapse of the giant immigration overhaul in the Senate might demonstrate that the dreaded status quo — 12 million people living in the country illegally and more arriving each day — is not really so dreadful after all.

 

The multitude of interests involved in the immigration debate — business groups, ethnic lobbies, politicians in both parties and the American public — in the end proved unwilling to yield enough to support the bipartisan compromise reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

As California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who helped negotiate the failed deal, said, the current immigrant situation in the United States is a de facto amnesty. Even the most ardent advocates of a border crackdown concede that it will be impossible to apprehend and deport 12 million people living here illegally.

 

But as much as everyone complains about the situation, the enormous black market in labor operating openly in the United States serves the interests of many involved, however imperfectly. It is an amnesty without amnesty.

 

“Inaction, the status quo, is particularly helpful to employers of unskilled, undocumented workers, because they obviously aren’t going to face the potential teeth of tougher employer sanctions,” said Daniel Tichenor, a research professor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University and author of “Dividing Lines: the Politics of Immigration Control in America.”

 

Low-wage industries such as landscaping and nursing homes could fare better in the current freely operating black market than under a heavily regulated temporary worker program that would require migrant workers to leave the country after two years.

 

A technology company lobbyist complained at one point that Silicon Valley is the only business group that really couldn’t live with the status quo, because tech companies rely on legal immigrants.

 

Read it here: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/09/MNGG8QCJ921.DTL