Look beyond border.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Pretend for a moment that you're president of a country that has failed for decades to stem a tide of illegal immigration.

Because of its dysfunctional immigration system, your nation has 11 million undocumented immigrants, most of whom are so determined to remain that even if they're caught and deported, they will find a way to return within weeks or days.

Despite a tenfold increase in spending on border security over the past decade, the prospect of good-paying jobs remains a powerful magnet to migrants - and the threat of capture an ineffective deterrent. Meanwhile, your country's economy has become so reliant on cheap immigrant labor that entire sectors might collapse if that work force were to disappear.

Leading lawmakers - members of your own political party - ignore your calls for comprehensive immigration reform. Instead, they devise a breathtakingly myopic and unrealistic plan that focuses exclusively on enforcement and that includes a giant fence along the entire length of the border.

What do you do, Mr. or Ms. President? Do you stand your ground and tell lawmakers to go back to the drawing board and return with broad reforms that deal not only with enforcement, but that also acknowledge the realities that 11 million people are living illegally in this country and that the economy relies on their presence? Or do you support skewed and punitive legislation that will only worsen the mess, with the faint hope that broader reforms might follow?

Confronted with this situation, President Bush has chosen the latter approach. Although he has acknow- ledged the need for broad, far-reaching reforms necessary to make U.S. immigration policy workable and humane, Bush supported a bill, sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., that imposes an array of new criminal penalties for immigration violations. The bill, approved by the House earlier this month, also makes detention and deportation of illegal immigrants easier and, yes, calls for a monster fence along the Mexican border.

Make no mistake, serious immigration reform must address enforcement and border security. But they are only two cogs in a much larger and more complex machine. Congress has tried the enforcement-only approach several times in recent decades, and each attempt has failed.

If Congress and the White House are serious about untangling the immigration snarl, they must find a way to deal with the country's insatiable appetite for inexpensive immigrant labor. They must bring the millions of illegal workers who are living and working in the shadows into the system.

Sens. John McCain and Ted Kennedy have proposed a promising bill that would provide temporary work visas for those workers and for newcomers. After six years and payment of a $2,000 fine, immigrants would be eligible for permanent residency. After another five years, they could apply for citizenship.

Bush should withdraw his support for Sensenbrenner's bill, and the Senate should refuse to consider it or any other approach that fails to address the full range of issues essential to serious and successful immigration reform.