The price of moving to a path to citizenship and bringing 12 million out of the shadows is quite high in the R-S-M outline (PDF – stands for Reid-Schumer-Menendez) released yesterday as a comprehensive immigration reform package. The country would have to hit multiple border security benchmarks before legalization processes could begin. DEA and ATF would be bolstered with resources at the border as the war on drugs continues unabated, despite its many failures. The Defense Department would station equipment at the border. The bill would also mandate a national ID card for the purposes of workplace enforcement. The pathway to citizenship, only after “the border is secure,” includes the steps that have been well-documented: paying a fine, learning English, taking a criminal background check, moving to the back of the line. There’s also a lot of restructuring of the legal immigration system, which is actually what’s broken here.

Frank Sharry calls it a centrist proposal, and really what they did here was take the existing Schumer-Graham framework and simply slap a new couple of names on it. In fact, Schumer is trolling for a Republican sponsor to basically recreate the process started with Lindsey Graham. The President hit the default praise switch and churned out another press release. The White House is being very canny about pushing for this, however, with David Axelrod only going so far as to say a process should be “set in motion” this year.

There’s obviously a political element to this, but you’d think that, if the bill merely was designed for political expediency, that they’d come up with something a little more humane, as long as they weren’t expecting for it to pass. This is a more serious effort to arrive at a compromise solution, even though giving in 70% of the way to Republicans on this one will not yield results, in all likelihood. If the health care bill caused screaming and yelling, you can imagine what to expect with this.

Jane has more.