Catherwood LibraryILR School

A comprehensive immigration bill survived a significant test on Tuesday as the Senate voted to keep a provision that would let hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers enter the country each year. If the guest worker program, part of the ?grand bargain? negotiated with the Bush administration by a bipartisan group of 12 senators, had been stripped from the bill, the fragile deal could have collapsed. Despite the vote on Tuesday, supporters of the bill were clearly on the defensive. Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, who helped write the bill, said eliminating the guest worker program would be a ?huge problem? for the architects of the proposal.