Don't fence in reform.

Byline: The Register-Guard

With the November elections swiftly approaching, congressional Republicans are caught in an immigration booby-trap of their own making.

After the the U.S. Senate approved a flawed but workable comprehensive immigration bill earlier this year, GOP leaders in the House turned their back on an opportunity to cooperate with the Republican-controlled Senate and White House to produce sensible reform.

Instead, House leaders spent the summer staging a silly series of scripted hearings aimed at vilifying the Senate bill and convincing Americans that the U.S.-Mexico border is a war zone crawling with terrorists and narco-thugs.

Now, with the election just weeks away, House Republicans have nothing to show voters on immigration reform except a schism within their party.

In a last-ditch effort, the House approved a flurry of new immigration bills in recent days that they hope to add to a must-pass homeland security spending bill before the election recess. Among other things, the legislation would build 700 miles of fence along the border with Mexico, make it a crime to tunnel underneath U.S. borders and make it easier to deport gang members who are not citizens.

John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House majority leader, hailed the bills as evidence that GOP lawmakers "are serious about securing our border and enforcing our law."

Boehner's got it wrong. The bills are evidence that House Republicans are so desperate to conceal their gross negligence on this vital issue that they're trying to pass a hodgepodge of enforcement measures and fob them off on voters as serious immigration reform.

The Senate should reject this cynical ploy and hold firm on its demand that immigration reform provide not only border security, but also a path to citizenship for qualified illegal immigrants and a guest worker program that matches immigrants with American jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.

That may prove difficult for Senate Republicans, who support construction of a fence and other border measures but want it to be part of comprehensive reform. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, understandably eager to convince voters that Republicans have delivered on immigration reform, is suggesting that senators could approve the enforcement measures and take up the other elements of comprehensive reform after the election.

However, Senate Republicans should heed the counsel of Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Specter rightly warns against dealing with the immigration issue on a piecemeal basis, warning that House leaders would have no incentive to negotiate on nonenforcement reforms in the future.

House Republicans have no one to blame for this mess but themselves. In an effort to motivate the party's conservative base in an election year, they myopically focused on punitive enforcement legislation, while refusing to consider the essential economic pieces of the immigration puzzle

Now, they're in a bind and want the Senate to bail them out. The Senate should respond by saying: "Sorry. See you after the election."