CIR remains stalled in Congress. Following the resolution of the health care legislation, individual Republican senators seem to be rethinking their commitment to the uniform opposition pushed by their leadership. The day after the final health care vote, the two Republican senators from Maine jumped ship and voted with Democrats on a bill opposed by the Republican leadership. That same day, when the rest of the Republicans were walking out on committee hearings, Sen. Lindsey Graham refused to walk out on a hearing considering an extension of benefits for homeless vets, even though he had to defy his leadership to do this.

Still, these are minor acts of rebellion and they do not necessarily portend a shift in the political climate. Granted, more and more Republican policy strategists are warning the party against opposing immigration reform, the elected members do not appear to have changed their minds on this subject.

Pretty much everyone agrees that time has almost run out and that the absolute "drop dead" date for Senate passage of an immigration bill is May 31st. If nothing has been passed by that date, it is over. For legislation to be passed by the end of May, it should already have been introduced. While it is still theoretically possible for something to get introduced and fast-tracked through the Senate, without substantial Republican cooperation, that is not going to happen.

If CIR is not going to be passed in this Congress, it may still be possible for something to be done in the lame duck session following the November election. Traditionally, this is when many important pieces of immigration legislation have been passed. For example, Senator Cornyn's SKIL bill passed the Senate in December, 2005 and would have passed the House, but for the refusal of Speaker Dennis Hastert to allow it to be considered.

It is entirely possible to see something like Congresswoman Lofgren's visa recapture bill pass as an amendment tacked onto a budget bill in December. This legislation is noncontroversial in that all it does is recapture several hundreds of thousands of visa numbers that were lost to do INS/CIS incompetence over the last decade. These are visas that have already been authorized by Congress, and should have been issued. They weren't because the immigration service failed to adjudicate enough cases to use up the quota. The unused visas were then lost.

Those interested in seeing some kind of immigration reform this year should now pivot from pushing CIR and switch to pushing visa recapture. While this will not solve all problems, it will provide substantial relief for a very large number of people.