Immigration advocates celebrated a White House meeting on Thursday, June 25, between President Barack Obama and more than two dozen bipartisan members of Congress.

“My administration is fully behind an effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform,” Obama said after emerging from the get-together.

It’s difficult to imagine that an issue as complex as immigration can be completed this year, when Congress has its hands full with health care and energy legislation, not to mention routine but big issues like appropriations and a Supreme Court nomination.

More important, the political fissures that caused the ground to crumble under immigration reform in 2007 still exist today, even though Republicans are in a much weaker position on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, intends to move a bill this year, but it may not be completed until next year.

In a speech on June 24, Schumer laid out seven principles for immigration reform. His call for a biometric employment verification system has drawn the most attention. But No. 6 on the list is also important to business.

“No immigration system would be worthwhile if it is unable to attract the best and brightest minds of the world to come to the United States and create jobs for Americans—as has been the case for Yahoo, Google, Intel, eBay and countless other companies,” he said.

But he also warned that the U.S. immigration system cannot encourage “underpaid, temporary workers from taking jobs that could and should be filled by qualified American workers.”

Threading the needle will be difficult. Some immigration advocates want to create a commission to do the job by controlling the flow of foreign workers.

The American Council on International Personnel opposes the idea and has issued its own set of principles for immigration reform.

Employers that belong to ACIP have at least 500 employees and operations in at least two countries. At the top of ACIP’s immigration reform wish list is what it calls a “trusted employer registration program” that would allow companies that play by immigration rules to have “timely, predictable and efficient access to visas for foreign professionals.”

What ACIP doesn’t want is an immigration commission determining whether international candidates can fill positions at U.S. companies. Such a bureaucracy won’t be able to discern the needs of a particular company or industry, it argues.

“How are they going to do these micro, micro, micro determinations?” asked Austin Fragomen Jr., managing partner at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in New York and chair of the ACIP board, at a recent ACIP conference in Arlington, Virginia.

The organizations that participated in the ACIP meeting—including Oracle and Intel—seek to hire the best possible talent to maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace, regardless of where the talent was born. They argue that the United States should keep foreign national students in the country after they’ve graduated with science and technical degrees from U.S. universities.

They are wary of being hamstrung by legislation such as a bill introduced by Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that would tighten requirements on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants.

More than 75 percent of the postdoctoral degree scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, are foreign nationals, according to Thomas Barnett, director of the organization’s international office.

“We just don’t have enough quality in the math and science areas in this country,” Barnett said.

Democrats and Republicans alike might take umbrage when companies assert that the best talent in a global economy may come from other parts of the globe—and they should be free to make those hires.

Barnett has an answer ready: “Senator or congressman, tell me what you have done lately to improve education in your state.”

Two numbers are becoming important as Congress formally begins the process of hammering out health care legislation this week: 80 and 20.

Many health care advocates say that about 80 percent of medical costs are generated by 20 percent of patients. On Capitol Hill, the ranking Republican of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, said his party and the Democrats agree on about 80 percent of health care reform.

But it’s the disagreement over the 20 percent of the remaining issues that is turning health care happy talk into grumbling. In a June 11 press conference, Senate HELP Committee Republicans accused Democrats of keeping them in the dark about the details and costs of the panel’s massive health care bill.

Indeed, the draft left out major items that will be added later, including an employer mandate and a government insurance coverage option.

Those omissions made it impossible for the Congressional Budget Office to do a complete analysis on the cost of the bill. Its preliminary projection is that the Kennedy measure would add $1 trillion to the federal deficit by 2019. In addition, the number of people covered by employers would decline by 10 percent, or 15 million.

Like Senate Republicans, the CBO said that it has not had a chance to parse the draft legislation, which the HELP Committee is slated to begin marking up on Wednesday, June 17.

“Although our reading of the draft language has informed our analysis, we have not had time to complete a thorough review of that of that language, which could have significant effects on any subsequent analysis provided by CBO and the JCT (Joint Committee on Taxation) staff,” the CBO stated.

The potential cost of the bill is giving Sen. Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, pause about the whole effort.

“So far, we haven’t seen any pay-fors,” Gregg said, using Capitol Hill lingo for provisions that would finance the package.

Gregg and his colleagues urged Democrats to slow down, even though President Barack Obama has told Congress to get a bill to his desk by this fall. That pace requires votes in the House and Senate by the end of July.

“We’re going more by deadlines rather than whether we’ve got it right or not, and that’s a mistake,” Enzi said.

Republicans also are digging in against the so-called public option in a national insurance exchange. They see such a government program as the single-payer camel’s nose poking into the health care tent.

Obama spoke for nearly an hour to the American Medical Association annual conference in Chicago on Monday, June 15, to try to allay fears about the cost of health care reform and the public insurance option.

He tried to pull off political jujitsu by portraying health care reform not as a budget buster but as the key to bringing down the current $1.8 trillion deficit. Failure to pass a bill this year would allow medical costs to spin out of control, he asserted.

“So to say it as plainly as I can, health care is the single most important thing we can do for America’s long-term fiscal health,” Obama said.

He says the administration has identified $950 billion in savings as a down payment on reform. He also says that he has commitments from hospitals, labor unions, insurers, medical device manufacturers and drug companies “to work together to cut national health care spending by $2 trillion over the next decade, relative to what it would have otherwise been.”

He touts a public insurance option as another way to cut costs because it would provide competition to the private sector.

In his AMA speech, he also pointed out areas where there is widespread agreement, such as computerizing health care records and investing in preventive care and research on the effectiveness of treatments. He made many of the same points highlighted by a group called America’s Agenda.

The big question hovering over Washington this summer will be whether Democrats and Republicans will coalesce around the policies that draw bipartisan support, or will they scuttle the whole health care effort over the 20 percent that stokes political anger.

There’s a chance that the process will go more smoothly in the Senate Finance Committee and that its bill will eventually be melded with the HELP bill into a measure that draws a strong Senate majority.

In fact, 80 is a good goal for the number of senators voting for final health care legislation. There are probably 20 Republicans who will never be convinced to support reform.

But if Democrats can’t persuade reasonable members of the GOP—like Enzi, Gregg and the top Finance Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa—to vote for it, then the bill probably needs to be scaled back or scrapped.

For the past couple weeks we’ve been hearing a lot about “empathy.” That’s one of the characteristics President Barack Obama said he wanted in the next Supreme Court justice.

He believes that his nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, possesses such a quality thanks to her hardscrabble upbringing in the South Bronx. In introducing her to the nation May 27, Obama said that she understood daily challenges that face most Americans, especially those who are poor.

“It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live,” Obama said. “Along the way [Sotomayor has] faced down barriers, overcome the odds, lived out the American dream that brought her parents here so long ago.”

During the last two weeks, Sotomayor has been making her rounds on Capitol Hill visiting senators who will vote on her nomination sometime this year. Her hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee will commence July 13.

As she makes her way toward what will likely be Senate confirmation, I’ll be watching to see how this “empathy” theme plays out. For now, it looks as if it’s one of those areas where the business world is a step ahead of some people in the political world, who are criticizing “empathy” as a code word for judicial activism.

I can understand wariness about judges who legislate from the bench. We depend on judges to uphold the law objectively. They ensure that the United States sets the best example in the world of a society that prospers under the rule of law.

But the background a judge brings to his or her role inevitably will influence how he or she rules on a case. It seems that the more backgrounds represented on the Supreme Court the better.

People who promote corporate diversity tend to make the same business case. A group of people with varying backgrounds and perspectives will make a better decision about a product or business strategy than a group of people who are alike.

This is especially true when it comes to finding new markets, according to Carl Brooks, president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council. 

“The new markets are obviously the global markets, but the other increasingly attractive market is the emerging domestic markets, which are populated by African Americans, Hispanics, females, Asian Americans,” Brooks said in an interview earlier this year. “To the extent you can ensure that you understand their needs, their desires, you have a greater opportunity to be able to have products and services which satisfy these groups.”

Tiane Mitchell Gordon, senior vice president for diversity and inclusion at AOL, calls diversity a strategic imperative. Law firms have gotten that message in part because they want to be as diverse as the corporate law departments with whom they work.

These companies and law firms are seeking “empathy” with their consumers and clients. They want to better understand and serve their markets. Everyone is familiar with the social justice arguments for diversity in hiring. But there’s also a strong business—or profit—case to be made.

In the same way, it stands to reason that a more diverse Supreme Court also would strengthen its ability to deliver justice.

But that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with the following Sotomayor statement, which she has repeated in several speeches: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Republicans should press Sotomayor on this assertion. Make her explain why her background automatically renders her decisions more valid than those made by someone like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.

Both Sotomayor and Roberts have been praised as having brilliant legal minds. A Supreme Court on which they both serve is likely to be stronger than one that didn’t include either of them.

You need a scorecard to keep up with President Barack Obama’s plethora of priorities. On the domestic policy side, he has vowed to make sweeping changes in health care, energy and education.

An important subset of education—workforce training—tends to fly under the radar in Washington, but it will require more presidential and congressional leadership than it has received in a long time.

Obama appears set to provide guidance. On May 8, he announced that the Departments of Labor and Education would work with states and educational institutions to allow recently laid off workers to receive unemployment payments while they are enrolled in training programs and to have easier access to educational grants.

“The idea here is to fundamentally change our approach to unemployment in this country, so that it’s no longer just a time to look for a new job, but is also a time to prepare yourself for a better job,” Obama said.

Now Obama will have to follow through in an area that has languished from neglect in Washington.

The federal law that undergirds training programs, the Workforce Investment Act, has been up for renewal for nearly six years but has been stymied by a variety of policy and political issues. Congress is under way with another attempt.

Most experts and users of the system agree that it needs to be more flexible to respond to local labor market needs. Too many programs are run in silos and fail to communicate with one another.

Determining what kind of training is offered for what kind of jobs is a huge question that can elicit many different answers. The Obama administration wants to focus on so-called “green jobs.” The $787 billion stimulus package included $500 million for training in that area.

Republicans caution that federal training should be improved for all kinds of occupations and worry about artificial demand being created by government fiat.

Democrats also question whether job training priorities have been set correctly. Rep. David Obey, D-Wisconsin and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, expressed concern at a May 12 hearing on the Department of Labor budget.

He noted that the stimulus bill included $250 million for training for health care industry jobs. But the administration’s budget request for the agency didn’t contain similar funding.

“If we’re serious about significant health care reform, we need to build the capacity of the system, and we’re falling short in this area,” Obey told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

The thousands of jobs that Dollar General Corp. will have to fill over the next couple years aren’t necessarily “green.” But they could offer a path out of the recession for thousands of workers—if they are qualified.

As Dollar General Stores become more automated in tracking and managing inventory, employees have to be more fluent with technology, according to David Bere, president and chief strategy officer.

They don’t have to have bachelor’s degrees, but they should have training beyond high school. “You need a higher skill set in our stores and distribution centers,” Bere said in an interview after a recent House hearing on the Workforce Investment Act.

Dollar General has long been an advocate of federal training programs. Bere urges other companies to join in the effort to reshape the system. 

“The business community has to step up,” Bere said. “Only by partnership is this going to get done.”

When it comes to job training, many constituencies want to see improvement. But it will take firm leadership from Obama and Congress to make sure that they work together to set priorities that make sense for workers and the economy.

What has passed for bipartisanship in Washington so far this year is really just the flexing of political muscle.

Throughout his campaign and his nascent administration, President Barack Obama touted his ability to forge consensus from warring political parties. So far, there’s no evidence of it. There doesn’t have to be, with Democrats holding significant majorities on Capitol Hill.

His stimulus bill passed with just three Republican votes—one of which is now on the Democratic side of the aisle. Congress approved his $3.5 trillion budget blueprint along partisan lines. And the first bill he signed—one dealing with pay discrimination—garnered only a small slice of Republican support.

Democrats often allow consideration of Republican amendments to legislation in committees and in floor debate—on the Senate side, at least. That’s because they know that have more than enough votes to squash GOP ideas.

But there was evidence during the previous Congress that normally adversarial sides could achieve consensus on major legislation. One example was a bill that put mental health and medical benefits on equal footing. The other was a measure that expanded the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In each case, the business lobby and advocacy groups came together and wrestled the legislation to the ground through tough, good-faith negotiations. The Democratic majorities in Congress left business with no other option.

Chai Feldblum led the disability side in the ADA talks. She hopes to use the model to move legislation that would foster novel work arrangements at U.S. companies.

As co-director of Workplace Flexibility 2010, an initiative based at the Georgetown University Law Center, Feldblum could be a catalyst for cooperation between business and advocacy groups.

Reaching agreement on the ADA bill required 10 months of negotiation over the definition of disability. Working through the meaning of flexible work arrangements, time off and career maintenance and re-entry—the three “buckets” of flexibility, as defined by the Georgetown group—could be a bigger challenge because there are so many dimensions to the effort.

“We think of this as more like climate change,” Feldblum says.

But she’s optimistic that consensus can be reached. “I’m more hopeful for this enterprise than [she was] for ADA,” she says.

The Society for Human Resource Management is eager to get to the negotiating table. On May 7, SHRM released a set of principles for flexible work designed to start a dialogue about alternatives to legislation like a paid sick leave bill that will soon be introduced.

The organization proposes that companies that voluntarily offer a certain amount of paid time off be protected from federal leave mandates.

Workplace Flexibility 2010 isn’t taking a position on SHRM’s idea, but it is happy that SHRM is raising its voice. “We welcome the fact of people saying: Let’s have a conversation,” Feldblum says.

The Senate is off to a bipartisan approach in addressing workplace flexibility. The Senate Workplace Flexibility Study Group was established in August by three Democrats—Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Herb Kohl  of Wisconsin, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut—and three Republicans: Michael Crapo of Idaho, Susan Collins of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio.

The panel is looking at research and data on flexibility practices and their effect on companies and employees. And they’re listening to everyone.

“It’s as even-handed an approach as you will see in this town,” says a Lincoln aide.

The foundation of cooperation is strong. “There is no gamesmanship,” Feldblum says.

Many companies argue that flexibility is one of the keys to competitiveness. We’ll see if political competition—partisanship—can be kept out of flexibility policy.