New Yorkers have a special interest in one piece of legislation awaiting the return of Congress today and tomorrow – the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, introduced in May by Senators McCain and Kennedy, and now sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee. New York senators, take note: If there’s anything wrong with this bill, it’s that the immigration reform doesn’t go far enough.

The McCain-Kennedy bill makes some important strides in the right direction. It would provide a process for immigrants currently in the country illegally to pay for their crime and move on with their lives, by levying a $2,000 fine to start the process of obtaining papers. This is designed to bring out of the shadows the millions of illegal immigrants (estimates of how many there are range from 8 to 12 million) who are already contributing to the American economy, while avoiding the moral hazard of an outright amnesty that would only reward past lawbreaking and encourage future crimes. Another example of progress is how the bill would more than double the number of employment-based visas for all categories to 290,000 a year.

The bill also includes a guest-worker program aimed at creating new, legal opportunities for persons who might otherwise sneak across the border. Up to 400,000 immigrants a year (equal to the estimated number of illegals who come annually) would qualify for work permits that would be good for up to six years before the immigrant would have to apply for a green card or leave. It’s a step in the right direction, although Congress would do better to increase the number of available green cards before this provision creates a cohort of immigrants in limbo about their permanent status, which has been an unhappy consequence of Germany’s guest-worker program. McCain-Kennedy does nothing to ease the red tape and bureaucratic backlog that plagues the asylum system.

The stakes are high, especially for New York, where immigration continues to be a major source of population growth, one of the pistons in the engine of economic growth. A 2003 study by the Public Policy Institute of New York State found that, absent immigration, New York state would have suffered a dramatic population decline of 519,000 in the 2000 census. Instead, new foreigners created net population growth of 1 million. All of which suggests that New York’s senators would serve their state and city well were they to rouse themselves on this issue and fight for a more aggressive expansion of immigration.