The Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO have been working together for several weeks now in an effort to come up a temporary guest worker program they can both back as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Whether they can do this will likely be a key factor in whether any such legislation passes Congress. The failure to strike a deal on this was one of the reasons the 2007 McCain-Kennedy effort failed.

Today they issued a joint press release announcing that …  they’re still working on that.  The release says that they have at least agreed on three principles to guide any legislation.  Those principles are: Americans should have first crack at the jobs in question; that the guest worker system be less bureaucratic; and, that the system needs to be more transparent.  That’s all pretty much the usual boilerplate. Those principles don’t call for any specific policies.