Senator McCain came to New York last night to promote his immigration reform plan, which he said creates an “orderly way for people to come to this country, work and feed their families, and go back to their home country,” as well as solving the problem of the “11 million people who live in the shadows” as illegal immigrants in America.

The senator, a leading 2008 Republican presidential prospect, was greeted with cheers from hundreds of immigrants, union organizers, business leaders, and four Democratic congressmen when he took to the podium last night in downtown Manhattan.

While many on both sides in Congress have avoided the sensitive issue of immigration reform, Mr. McCain has taken it on with vigor, advocating providing legal status to the nation’s undocumented immigrants based on security, economic, and humanitarian grounds.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 800 at the Service Employees International Union’s auditorium, he suggested that his bill – bipartisan legislation introduced with Senator Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts – would make the country more secure by taking a comprehensive approach to regularizing border traffic. He said security would increase because there would be a legal avenue to enter America in the form of a guest-worker program, in addition to the creation of a “tamper-proof visa” and increased employer enforcement.

“The reason people are coming across the border is to feed themselves and their families because they can’t do that where they are,” he said, citing statistics that 97% of illegal immigrants have jobs. “If they saw they could not get a job unless they had this tamper-proof visa, then they would not come across.”

Mr. McCain also stressed that unlike the last major immigration reform – a 1986 amnesty that led to more than a doubling of illegal immigration – the undocumented would have to earn the chance for citizenship through measures such as paying a $2,000 fine and back taxes, passing a background check, learning English, and working six years on a temporary visa. “Someone who calls that amnesty is not reading the same dictionary that I am,” Mr. McCain said.

Although his bill has seven co-sponsors and the basic support of most members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it suffered a setback last week, when the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Specter, unveiled legislation that will be used to start the discussion this week. Rather than creating a path to citizenship for the undocumented, it would provide special immigrant worker visas.

Mr. McCain and other politicians at the rally were highly critical of such an approach. Most notably, Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat of New York, compared a guest-worker program without an opportunity to become an American citizen to “slavery.”

Mr. McCain ended the rally by vowing that there will be change, but also cautioning that it will be difficult. “We are talking about one of the most fundamental challenges in American life, and in many respects one of the most difficult challenges we face,” he said.