“The tendency for the supply of immigrant labor to the United States to be concentrated among low-skilled workers served to depress the wages of workers in the lowest skill groups,” reports a Canadian journal, citing a new Statistics Canada study. “Coupled with only a small dampening effect of immigration on the wages of highly-skilled workers, who saw their real weekly wages increase by 20% in the United States between 1980 and 2000, immigration served to magnify growth in US wage inequality between low-skilled and high-skilled workers over the same period.”

You mean a rising tide of salaries doesn’t lift all ships? An interesting finding, but it won’t change the debate. What’s happening now is pure, partisan hardball.

“It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept,” writes Peggy Noonan, the former Bush senior speech writer, who can turn a phrase better than she analyzes a bill.

While the efficacy of so-called border protection draws most of the opponent’s ire, there is relatively little debate about the provisions that may have the most long-term impact: the “merit point” system of scoring that for the first time institutes a bias toward admitting highly skilled, educated and gainfully employable foreigners. According to the bill, points are awarded according to employment, education, English proficiency, civics knowledge and family ties in the US.

In devising this system, the U.S. is following in the path of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, which reportedly grants work visas to graduates of one of the world’s top 50 business schools. “Compared to most other selection systems, points systems appear to avoid the ‘gamesmanship’ between employers and bureaucrats that afflict case-by-case selection systems,” Demetrios Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute told National Public Radio.

The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, if approved, will be recalled as an historic – and rare – compromise between liberals and conservatives. The bill’s co-author, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), recently said, “Our competitiveness in the global economy is at risk when our employers cannot find the able workers they need.”

This week we will find out if the Senate buys into Kennedy’s reasoning, but approval is far from certain.

Reforming the broken H-1B program is a priority for both parties. According to today’s Washington Post, “Republicans, with the White House’s backing, are proposing a three-year temporary-worker program that would allow 400,000 new workers to enter the country each year, provided they return to their home countries once their visas expire. A much smaller number, perhaps 20,000, would be able to apply for a work visa that could lead to legal permanent residency.”

Consensus is building for a significant policy shift under which for the first time an immigrant’s job skills will count more than their family ties in determining who is welcome.

A bipartisan committee that includes Bush officials, Democrats and Republicans met several times in recent months to hammer out a possible compromise with enough support to pass this year. According to CBS News, one idea that these strange bedfellows seem to agree upon is this: “A merit system similar to Canada’s under which immigrants would earn points toward citizenship. Points would be granted for things like work skills and language ability.”

It’s clear the politicians are collaborating in order to achieve a more defensible position come election time in 2008. The compromise ideas that have been discussed all seem to hinge upon “securing” the U.S.-Mexico border before moving forward with other promised reforms. But securing the border may prove to be next to impossible.

Is this just more political gamesmanship or will we see meaningful reform in this pre-election year? What would you like to see done, if anything, to help reform guest worker programs?

In just two days last week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department was flooded with 133,000 requests for 65,000 H-1B slots. The USCIS cut off the application process – get this – nearly two months faster than it did last year and four months faster than in 2005. What’s going on here?

For those of you unfamiliar with the visa acronyms H-1B and L-1, H-1Bs are a regulated mechanism to enable companies to import talent with “specialty” skills otherwise unavailable in the U.S. L-1s are typically used for managers. You won’t be surprised to hear that the vast majority of H-1B workers come from India and work in high-tech jobs, typically as programmers. The otherwise unavailable standard (my words, not theirs) is somewhat related to location, too. In some instances, these skills exist domestically, but available workers don’t want to move to the employer’s location. It’s a highly imperfect market.

Assuming the applications are in order, the winners are drawn at random. The H-1B workers can stay for up to three years and if an extension is granted, six years is also possible. Employers must pay market wages – yet another point of controversy about the use (or misuse) of these visas. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report last June that found “more than 3,000 applications that were certified even though the wage rate on the application was lower than the prevailing wage for that occupation.”

H-1B reform is a possibility, according to an article in the current InformationWeek, Senators Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., have proposed to bar companies from outsourcing H-1B or L-1 workers to other companies. Critics of the visa program cite data that show the largest users of the program (measured by applicants) are Indian service providers. But more importantly it would ask these employers to make a “good faith” effort to hire domestically first rather than import global talent. Interestingly, under the Grassley-Durbin bill, the USCIS would go into the business of hosting a job board to match American candidates to these positions. That’s such a wacky idea it might pass – assuming the cap is raised substantially, too.

As InformationWeek’s Marianne Kolbasuk McGee points out, if Congress fails to act on the reforms this year, an election year is a remote possibility at best. How would you propose to fix this process?