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.”