Super-conservative Utah has passed and their governor is likely to sign realistic immigration reform. Most other conservatives in the country would probably call it amnesty. I’m just going to pull a few paragraphs from the article that will give you an idea of what the bill is and their logic for it.

Utah’s guest-worker bill doesn’t grant citizenship, of course, but in every other way it’s exactly what national Republicans have derided as “amnesty.” It would grant work permits to undocumented immigrants, and their immediate families, who pay a fine, clear a criminal background check and study English.

The bill’s chief sponsor, state Rep. Bill Wright, is a plain-spoken dairy farmer who describes his politics as “extremely” conservative, likes Sarah Palin and believes he may have once voted for a Democrat – possibly 40 years ago for sheriff. He admires the work ethic of the Hispanic farmhands he’s employed over the years and doesn’t care much for anything the government does, least of all the idea that it might deport millions of immigrant workers and their families.

“That’s not gonna happen,” Wright told me. “They’ve got cars, they’ve got money borrowed, they own property, they are intertwined. Just be real and face facts the way they are.”

[Speaking about Arizona's law]

“They’ve had their 15 minutes in the media and now the adults are going to start talking about how to handle matters,” said Paul Mero, executive director of Utah’s most prominent conservative think tank, the Sutherland Institute, who helped draft the compact. “We’ve been able to break through that political barrier put up by the wing nuts who see every brown person as a criminal.”

The advocates’ genius was to reframe the cause of immigration reform, including the guest-worker program, as fundamentally a conservative project. In the face of sound bites from reform opponents such as “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” Utah conservatives shot back with: What part of destroying the economy don’t you understand? And by the way, what part of breaking up families don’t you understand?

The lesson from the “Utah Way” is that pragmatists in search of solutions can initiate a reform movement outside the legislature and build a case and a coalition that appeal to conservatives. By offering ideas that may provide a fix in the absence of federal action, they may trump the tired slogans of opponents of reform.

This is a very interesting development. Hopefully it will spark similar pragmatic solutions elsewhere.

Enjoy knowing it won’t.

Adam Feser