But it nowhere suggests imposing sanctions on U.S. employers who hire illegal aliens. That would be the surest way of shutting down the economic magnet that lures hundreds of thousands north from Mexico every year.

It is a truism to say every bill crafted by Congress and eventually signed into law is about politics. It is meant to be. That was what Congress, democracy and the Constitution of the United States are all about.

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic very deliberately designed the House of Representatives to have terms lasting only two years, contrast to the four-year, five-year or even seven-year terms for which the members of lower houses of most later successful democracies in the world are elected. This was designed to make the lower house, which contains the main fiscal spending power under the Constitution, to be more responsive to popular needs and demands.

The fact that both houses of Congress have been working so feverishly to craft an acceptable border security bill before the midterm congressional elections in November therefore speaks volumes about the rapidly growing importance that illegal immigration and border security are taking on the U.S. political stage.

But in contrast to the blizzard of legislation that swept through Congress to beef up homeland security, reorganize the federal government, and to fund the wars on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, the versions of the border security bill that have emerged in Congress are striking for how anemic they are.

That is because while al-Qaida and other extreme Islamist groups had no voting constituencies in the United States worth courting, illegal immigrants do.

For there are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them Hispanic, and the largest single group within those Hispanic speakers are from Mexico. But there are already around 39 million citizens of the United States who are of Hispanic origin or who are Spanish-speaking.

The challenge in crafting the border security bill therefore for both Republicans and Democrats is to be able to show constituents progress on the issue that will make them feel safer without angering or alienating significant Hispanic-American elements of society at the same time.

In terms of national policy, this approach is wise as well as politically shrewd. Senior homeland security analysts within the Bush administration are well aware of the pitfalls of alienating significant elements of the illegal immigrant population, as well as the U.S. Hispanic-American community, with measures that are seen as unfairly harsh and exclusionist.

This was the thinking behind President George W. Bush's much criticized amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. That plan, while fiercely criticized from the political right and left, was quietly welcomed by many law enforcement officials and analysts precisely because its guiding purpose was to try and prevent illegals from being alienated into a lawless political subculture where they might potentially fall under the control of drug cartels and extremist groups.

However, the border security legislation that is now pending does not appear to be motivated by such statesmanlike and far-reaching concerns. The Republican majority in both houses of Congress is desperate to push it through so that Republican members in the Southwest seeking re-election can point to what appears to be substantive progress on the issue. By the same token, Democrats in the Southwest are eager to rip the credibility of the legislation to shreds.

Republicans have been following the national security and border security game plan spearheaded by Karl Rove, President Bush's veteran chief political strategist, to try and fend off the Democratic challenge on the economy, high energy prices and Iraq in the midterm campaign.

It is a shrewd call because Democrats cannot simply try and follow a "me-too" policy as they did in backing the president on national security after Sept. 11, 2001, and in largely supporting his decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein in 2003. For Hispanic-Americans comprise one of the most important elements in the modern Democratic Party.

However, Bush and Rove dare not drive the anti-border security issue too hard either for political as well as strategic reasons. Their strategy ever since the 2000 presidential campaign has been to woo significant numbers of Hispanic-Americans away from the Democrats using a combination of free market, low tax and culturally conservative issues.

In the 2004 national elections, that strategy paid off big time in Florida and across the Southwest. Some right-wing activist critics of the president's immigration policies have even argued that Bush and Rove are looking ahead to 2012 and 2016 and that they want to prepare the way for the president's half-Hispanic nephew George Prescott Bush to be a credible presidential candidate down the line leading a new moderate-Republican-Hispanic coalition.

With all these considerations in the political stew cooking on Capitol Hill, it should be no surprise that the legislation emerging is being widely seen as an ineffectual compromise or fudge on the issues it is meant to tackle.

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