After years of bickering and foot-dragging, President Bush and Congress appear to have found a compromise on immigration.

The Senate is conducting the first debates on a bill that would reform the nation's immigration system. The House will take up the measure in July. After watching Congress do nothing for three years, a compromise represents real progress.

However, as desperately needed as reform is, railroad the measure through is a bad idea. The nations needs some assurance that the cure won't be worse than the disease.

On the surface, the measure seems to get beyond the sound-bites that characterize most people's idea of immigration reform. For example, it addresses the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants (20 million by some counts) who are already here by offering them a chance to earn citizenship. They would pay a fine, get a job, learn English and send the head of household back to the old country temporarily to apply.

Visas would be doled out based on a point system, putting more value on an immigrant's work skills, experience and English proficiency than whether he or she has family already in the country.

The bill also creates a temporary guest worker program, under which foreign laborers would be allowed to come here and work for two years, at which time they would have to go home for a year before applying for another two-year stint.

The compromise plan also calls for penalties against employers who violate immigration laws when hiring workers, a move that would remove some of the incentive for immigrants to cross the borders illegally.

And it addresses border security, calling for the deployment of 18,000 new Border Patrol agents; four drone aircraft to monitor the border; and the construction of 200 miles of vehicle barriers, 370 miles of fencing and 70 ground-based radar and camera towers. The measure also calls for new means to verify identities for employment.

The measure, like all compromises, has its detractors on both sides of the aisle, from anti-immigrant groups who claim it is a dressed-up amnesty program, to immigrant advocates who say it does not do enough to unify families and discriminates against the poor and unskilled.

But compromises were never meant to be perfect, just workable.

The residency provisions are a humane and just way to deal with the men, women and children already within our borders. It would be logistically impossible to round everyone up for deportation. Requiring a heavy fine and other conditions is hardly amnesty. Amnesty usually means unconditional forgiveness.

However, there are some details Congress must weigh as it goes through the bill, instead of ramming it through and pronouncing the problem solved.

For example, the visa and guest worker programs are tied to strengthening border security. While border security is important, implementing those provisions won't happen overnight. The most optimistic view is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's estimate that it may take 18 months to implement. While that's happening, the immigrants who are here will be living in the shadows with little incentive to legalize their status and little legal protection.

Likewise, there's no guarantee that fortifying the border is going to keep determined people out. The Great Wall of China and the Maginot Line are monuments to the futility of physical border control.

There are easier ways to get into the United States than crossing the southwest deserts. Just get a tourist or student visa and don't go home when it expires. We need a better system of tracking visa holders and making sure they leave when their time is up.

These and other issues need to be considered carefully as Congress debates the bill. If forethought had gone into immigration reform in the 1980s, we wouldn't have the problems we do today.

Going through the bill carefully and addressing its flaws may take time, but it is time well spent if the end result is a lasting reform of our immigration system.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A6.