Discerning trends in the Capitol Hill agenda requires skill at reading between the lines.

But President Barack Obama made the timeline for immigration reform much clearer for us all in an August 10 press conference after a summit meeting with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister.

Obama acknowledged that with health care reform slowing down, energy legislation looming in the Senate and financial regulation reform hovering in the wings, it will be impossible to pass an immigration bill this year.

“Now, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” Obama said. “I would anticipate that before the year is out we will have draft legislation along with sponsors potentially in the House and the Senate who are ready to move this forward, and when we come back next year, that we should be in a position to start acting.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chair of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, will be the point person on immigration reform in Congress. He originally promised to produce a comprehensive bill by Labor Day. Now he has walked that back to offering a proposal sometime this fall.

“We’re making great progress,” he told reporters just before the Senate broke for its August recess. “I’m not setting any deadlines here.”

Employment verification will continue to twist in the wind because proponents of comprehensive reform want to save that chip for negotiations involving a path to citizenship for undocumented workers currently in the United States.

So, this fall, immigration action likely will revolve around employment verification. In September, the House and Senate must reconcile different versions of homeland security appropriations bills.

The Senate measure includes permanent reauthorization of E-Verify, the government-run electronic verification system reviled by many business groups. It also codifies a Department of Homeland Security regulation that requires all federal contractors to sign up for E-Verify.

Finally, the Senate bill would deny funding to the DHS to rescind a regulation on Social Security no-match letters that could force employers to fire workers whose information on earnings reports doesn’t align with that in government databases.

There’s a lot to sort out in the homeland appropriations legislation, but not nearly as much as in health care reform. Both the House and Senate missed their goals of passing health care bills before the summer break.

That pushes the big battles into the fall. On your scorecard, note that the most important action will occur in the Senate Finance Committee. For now, it is looking like the last hope for a bipartisan bill.

Three Democrats, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and three Republicans, led by the ranking Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been working for weeks on a bill. Grinding out consensus means that controversial provisions—such as a public insurance option and an employer mandate—will likely fall by the wayside.

But such an outcome will enrage liberal Democrats who have staked their claim in health care reform on establishing a public option—and, to a lesser extent, an employer mandate—like the ones in House legislation and the measure produced by Senate health committee.

The business community is hoping for the bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to produce a palatable bill.

“The Finance Committee is closer to getting it right than any other plan that exists right now,” said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a group representing chief executives of some of the largest U.S. corporations. “If they are successful, will the president support their version of reform?”

That’s probably the most important question in the health care debate. Those participating in the negotiations were optimistic but circumspect before the Senate headed home for August.

“We’re making steady progress and doing this in a very professional way,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota.

Finally, in negotiations on another bill important to Workforce Management readers, the principals aren’t providing much guidance on developments. The Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions, has been stalled for months because of a lack of support among moderate Democrats in the Senate.

Schumer also is a player on this bill. He is one of the senators trying to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy his colleagues who believe that the bill would hurt businesses struggling to survive the recession.

“There’s a group of people working on it, and we’re making great progress,” Schumer said.

Reading between the lines, it looks as if predictions that the Senate won’t act on EFCA this year may be right. But keep an eye on the measure. The exhilarating and frustrating thing about Capitol Hill is that conventional wisdom is consistently overturned.