The nation certainly sounds as if it’s in an angry place on immigration.

A major Senate reform bill collapsed in rancor in June, and every effort to revive innocuous bits of it, like a bill to legalize exemplary high school graduates, has been crushed. Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York hatched a plan to let illegal immigrants earn driver’s licenses — and steamrollered into the Valley of Death. Asked if she supported Mr. Spitzer, Senator Hillary Clinton tied herself in knots looking for the safest answer.

The Republican presidential candidates, meanwhile, are doggedly out-toughing one another — even Rudolph Giuliani, who once defended but now disowns the immigrants who pulled his hard-up city out of a ditch. A freshman Democratic representative, Heath Shuler of North Carolina, has submitted an enforcement bill bristling with border fencing and punishments. Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, for whom restricting immigration is the first, last and only issue, says he will not run again when his term expires next year. I have done all I can, he says, like some weary gunslinger covered in blood and dust.

The natural allies of immigrants have been cowed into mumbling or silent avoidance. The Democrats’ chief strategist, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, went so far as to declare immigration the latest “third rail of American politics.” This profile in squeamishness was on full display at the Democratic presidential debate last week in Las Vegas, when Wolf Blitzer pressed the candidates for yes-or-no answers on driver’s licenses and Mrs. Clinton, to her great discredit, said no.

This year’s federal failure will not be undone until 2009 at the earliest, while states and local governments will continue doing their own thing, creating a mishmash of immigration policies, most of them harsh and shortsighted. But the wilderness of anger into which Mr. Tancredo helped lead America is not where the country has to be on this vitally important issue, nor where it truly is.

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Mrs. Clinton was closer to being right the first time, when she haltingly defended Mr. Spitzer’s reasoning. Fixing immigration is not a yes-or-no question. It’s yes and no. Or if you prefer, no and yes — no to more illegal immigration, to uncontrolled borders and to a flourishing underground economy where employer greed feeds off worker desperation. Yes to extending the blanket of law over the anonymous, undocumented population — through fines and other penalties for breaking the nation’s laws and an orderly path to legal status and citizenship to those who qualify.

These are the ingredients of a realistic approach to a complicated problem. It’s called comprehensive reform, and it rests on the idea that having an undocumented underclass does the country more harm than good. This is not “open-borders amnesty,” a false label stuck on by those who want enforcement and nothing else. It’s tough on the border and on those who sneaked across it. It’s tough but fair to employers who need immigrant workers. It recognizes that American citizens should not have to compete for jobs with a desperate population frightened into accepting rock-bottom wages and working conditions. It makes a serious effort to fix legal immigration by creating an orderly future flow of legal workers.

Americans accept this approach. The National Immigration Forum has compiled nearly two dozen polls from 2007 alone that show Americans consistently favoring a combination of tough enforcement and earned legalization over just enforcement. Elections confirm this. Straight-talking moderates like Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico thrive in the immigration crucible along the southern border. Those who obsess about immigration as single-issue hard-liners, like the Arizonans J. D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, have disappeared, booted by voters. Voters in Virginia this month rejected similar candidates and handed control of the State Senate to Democrats.

It may not be “amnesty” that gets Americans worked up as much as inaction. They seem to sense the weakness and futility in the enforcement-only strategy, the idea of tightening the screws on an informal apartheid system until it is so frightening and hopeless that millions of poor people pack up and leave.

That is the attrition argument, the only answer the anti-amnesty crowd has to comprehensive reform. It is, of course, a passive amnesty that rewards only the most furtive and wily illegal immigrants and the bottom-feeding employers who hire them. It will drive some people out of the country, but will push millions of others — families with members of mixed immigration status, lots of citizen children and practically a nation’s worth of decent, hard workers — further into hiding.

We are already seeing what a full-bore enforcement-only strategy will bring. Bias crimes against Hispanic people are up, hate groups are on the march. Legal immigration remains a mess. Applications for citizenship are up, and the federal citizenship agency, which steeply raised its fees to increase efficiency, is drowning in paperwork and delays. American citizens are being caught up in house-to-house raids by immigration agents.

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America is waiting for a leader to risk saying that the best answer is not the simplest one. As John Edwards said at the last debate, “When is our party going to show a little backbone and strength and courage and speak up for those people who have been left behind?”

He was talking about the poor and people without health insurance, but he could — and should — have included a host of others: Business owners who want to hire legal workers. Americans who don’t want their opportunities undermined by the off-the-books economy. Children whose dreams of education and advancement are thwarted by their parents’ hopeless immigration status. And the immigrants, here and abroad, who want to find their place in a society that once welcomed their honest labor, but can’t find a way to do it anymore.

Rudy Giuliani can play a little rough at times, but there are some moments when an inner light turns on and he turns downright idealistic. One of those moments came on Oct. 10, 1996, as he stepped on the podium at the Kennedy School of Government to deliver a speech on immigration.

“I’m pleased to be with you this evening to talk about the anti-immigrant movement in America,” he said, “and why I believe this movement endangers the single most important reason for American greatness, namely, the renewal, reformation and reawakening that’s provided by the continuous flow of immigrants.”

Giuliani continued: “I believe the anti-immigrant movement in America is one of our most serious public problems.” It can “be seen in legislation passed by Congress and the president.” (Republicans had just passed a welfare reform law that restricted benefits to legal immigrants.) “It can be seen in the negative attitudes being expressed by many of the politicians.”

Giuliani said, somewhat unfairly, that the anti-immigrant movement at that time continued the fear-mongering and discrimination of the nativist movements of the 1920s and the Know-Nothing movement of the 19th century. He celebrated Abraham Lincoln for having the courage to take on the anti-immigrant forces. He detailed the many ways immigration benefits the nation.

Then he turned to the subject of illegal immigration: “The United States has to do a lot better job of patrolling our borders.” But, he continued, “The reality is, people will always get in.”

“In New York City,” he said, “we recognize this reality. New York City’s policy toward undocumented immigrants is called ‘Executive Order 124.’ ” This order protected undocumented immigrants from being reported when they used city services. Giuliani was then fighting the federal government, which wanted to reverse it.

“There are times,” he declared, “when undocumented aliens must have a substantial degree of protection.” They must feel safe sending their children to school. They should feel safe reporting crime to the police. “Similarly, illegal and undocumented immigrants should be able to seek medical help without the threat of being reported. When these people are sick, they are just as sick and just as contagious as citizens.”

This was a fervent speech. And it’s one of many such speeches Giuliani has made over the years. On Sept. 19, 1995, he delivered an immigration speech at the United Nations in which he noted, “Sometimes leadership means taking unpopular positions, rejecting harmful political fads.”

Just last year, I saw him passionately deliver remarks at the Manhattan Institute Hamilton Award Dinner in which he condemned the “punitive approach” to immigration, “which is reflected in the House legislation that was passed, which is to make it a crime to be an illegal or undocumented immigrant.”

To “deal with it in a punitive way,” he said then, “is actually going to make us considerably less secure than we already are.” The better approach, he continued, is to embrace the Senate’s comprehensive reform and to separate the criminal illegals from the hard-working ones.

These speeches are the real Rudy. These speeches represent the Rudy who once went overboard and declared, “If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city.”

This is why Fred Siegel, a Giuliani biographer, accurately called him an “immoderate centrist.” This is why Giuliani won 43 percent of the Hispanic vote in the mayoral race of 1997. This is why his candidacy once had the potential to renovate the G.O.P.

Of course it hasn’t turned out that way. At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque. They are not renouncing the policies they championed as city and state officials, but the emphasis as they run for federal office is all in the other direction. In effect, they are competing to drive away Hispanic votes and make the party unelectable in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and the nation at large.

In this way, they are participating in the greatest blown opportunity in recent political history. At its current nadir, the G.O.P. had been blessed with five heterodox presidential candidates who had the potential to modernize the party on a variety of fronts. They could be competing to do that, but instead they are competing to appeal to the narrowest slice of the old guard and flatter the most rigid orthodoxies of the Beltway interest groups. Giuliani could have opened the party to the armies of dynamism — the sort of hard-working strivers who live in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx; instead he has shelved one of his core convictions.

Someday Rudy Giuliani will look back on this moment and wonder why he didn’t run as himself.

While the United States struggles to accommodate the tide of migrants seeking opportunities and a better life north of the border, some migrants are seeking opportunities even further north.

 

Upwards of 1,400 workers could travel to British Columbia, Canada, from Mexico this year to work in the province’s orchards, berry fields, and greenhouses under the federally sponsored Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. When the program started in British Columbia in 2004, just 47 workers participated.

 

Developed in 1966 to bring Caribbean workers to Ontario, the program employed over 18,000 foreign workers last year. Of these, almost two-thirds—11,720—came from Mexico.

 

Migrants are increasingly needed in Canada, where Glen Lucas of the B.C. Fruit Growers’ Association said it’s increasingly difficult to entice an urban population to harvest fruit. While hundreds of students from Quebec are willing to travel across the country each summer to harvest cherries, by the time apples are ready for picking workers are hard to find.

 

Typically, the Okanagan Valley requires about 3,300 seasonal workers to harvest and sort cherries each summer, and to pick apples. Workers who sort cherries are paid at least Can.$9 an hour (Can.$1 more than minimum wage), Lucas said, while most growers are paying apple harvesters Can.$17 to $21 a bin (or about Can.$10 an hour). A Canadian dollar is equivalent to about U.S.$0.90.

 

Shortages

 

But orchard work is physically demanding, and as other sectors of the B.C. economy have taken off, pickers have gone for the better-paying jobs available.

 

“Five years ago, we had an adequate number of workers here, and just in the last five years, we started getting shortages,” Lucas said. “Quebec workers are our first choice, but when you’re short, you need the security of being able to harvest your crop.”

 

Mexicans are filling the gap.

 

In 2005, 36 migrants worked at three orchards in the Okanagan. Lucas believes that number could triple, perhaps rising even as high as 200 as new growers sign on with the B.C. program.

 

That’s despite the fact the program comes at a premium to growers, who incur higher labor costs than if they were employing domestic help.

 

For example, students from Quebec each summer can make do with a tent for accommodation, but farms that hire migrants are obliged to provide housing that meets government standards and meal facilities, as well as transportation to and from job sites.

 

While employers can charge some of the added costs to the worker, accommodation and other employer-supplied benefits can add upwards of Can.$3 to the base wage of Can.$8.60 an hour.

 

Still, Osoyoos cherry grower Ranbir Kambo, a director of the B.C. program, believes the cost is worthwhile. The pay attracts workers willing and able to do the work, yet is more affordable than trying to match wages of between Can.$9.50 and $18 an hour that vineyards are offering.

 

The program isn’t without problems, but Kambo said these are being addressed. For example, last year a grower in Oliver refused to pay return airfare for his workers; he isn’t participating this year. In the Lower Mainland, a grower providing inadequate housing prompted the adoption of guidelines for housing as well as inspections.

 

But workers’ advocates such as Adriana Paz of the B.C. chapter of Justicia for Migrant Workers, said guest-worker status puts workers at an ongoing disadvantage.

 

Human beings

 

“[Growers] require migrant labor because they face trouble trying to find a local population,” she said. “[But] if you are bringing workers who are going to help you raise your level of productivity, it’s not free. The other side of the coin is you also have to take care of them as human beings.”

 

Lucas acknowledges this but notes that Canada’s guest-worker program is an attractive alternative to crossing illegally into the United States.

 

“The worker knows that if he comes up and works on a temporary visa, he gets to go home and see his family,” Lucas said. If all goes well, the worker is then able to return to Canada the following season.

 

Agriculture only

 

Since the program also specifies agricultural employment, Lucas said there’s little fear in Canada that guest workers will move from harvesting into other forms of work, as often happens in the United States.

 

“It’s a critical difference,” he said.