Until it collapsed on Friday, a compromise immigration plan in the Senate offered Rigoberto Morales a chance to reach his dream of becoming an American citizen.
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Mr. Morales had worked eight years in the sun-baked fields of Immokalee, Fla., in the southern part of the state, picking tomatoes, evading the authorities, and sending most of his earnings to his mother and daughter in Mexico. The Senate plan would have allowed Mr. Morales, 25, to apply for permanent residency because he has lived here more than five years.
But as tantalizing as the possibility was, Mr. Morales said he never really believed Congress would solve his plight.
"It's a very bad thing because we're working very hard here and there's no support from the government," he said, standing outside a dreary shack where he lives with his wife and three other tomato pickers, all illegal immigrants from Mexico. "We're only working. We're not committing a sin."
Many of the nation's approximately 11 million illegal immigrants — as well as their employers — have long sought some of the major provisions in the Senate proposal, which failed amid partisan rancor.
In interviews, employers and illegal workers said the bill would have offered significant improvement, and several said the failure of the compromise was a lost opportunity.
"This is disappointing," said Edward Overdevest, president of Overdevest Nurseries in Bridgeton, N.J. "I think it is a setback for reason, it is a setback for common sense."
Mr. Overdevest said the Senate had failed to solve a problem that has been festering for years.
Mr. Overdevest and other employers who rely on an existing guest worker program that is smaller than what was proposed had hoped that the Senate would address the reams of red tape they say have plagued the program.
Antonia Fuentes, a Mexican who has picked tomatoes in Immokalee for two years, said legal status, even as a guest worker, would have allowed her to breathe easier even though life would have remained hard. "We live here in fear," said Ms. Fuentes, 18. "We fear Immigration will come, and many people just don't go out."
Yet she and others were wary of a provision in the Senate plan that would have forced illegal immigrants who have been here from two to five years to return home and then apply for temporary work in the United States. A million immigrants who have been here illegally for less than two years would have had to leave with little promise of returning.
Paulino Pineda, a community college custodian in Perrysburg, Ohio, outside Toledo, said any bill that did not provide amnesty to all illegal immigrants was flawed.
"It's not a democratic solution," said Mr. Pineda, 65, who moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1992 and sends money home to his 11 children. "If people come here, work very hard, do everything they're told to do, and then when they're not needed anymore they're told to take your things and go back, they might as well be slaves."
According to the Department of Labor, the United States economy will add about five million jobs in businesses like retail, food service and landscaping over the next decade, with not enough American workers to meet the need.
Many employers — especially in industries that rely on large numbers of unskilled laborers — had embraced the idea of a guest-worker program. They said it would stabilize the workforce, reduce the high cost of turnover and perhaps increase the number of workers available.
But others said an expanded guest-worker program would bring higher costs and more paperwork, and were cheered by the Senate bill's defeat.
"Yay!" said Jay Taylor, president of Taylor & Fulton, a tomato grower in Florida, Maryland and Virginia, who said that the bill was too hastily drafted and that Congress had not grasped the complexity of the issue. Mr. Taylor said guest workers should be able to come and go as they pleased, with freedom to earn wages in this country but no promise of citizenship or benefits.
"It was a dinner cooked in a pressure cooker," said Mr. Taylor, who employs nearly 1,000 immigrants. "What we need is something that comes out of a crock pot. We need something that is well thought out, well planned and well executed, and in the atmosphere we are in today on this subject, we're not going to get that kind of situation."