We need immigration reform that includes a guest-worker program.

• Position: OPINION: COLORADOBIZ VIEWPOINT

You can't help but see them throughout your work day and beyond: the kitchen workers who make your sandwich at fast-food joints, the janitors who empty your trash at the office, the landscaping crews dispatched from the back of a truck, the housekeepers making their morning rounds at the hotel.

More likely than not, those workers are made up largely of immigrants. And they're here because the market has a constant need for their labor. Whether it's for low-skill, meager-pay jobs or for high-tech upscale work, Colorado companies must have access to workers without fear of breaking the law or becoming mired in red tape.

ColoradoBiz supports an immigration reform bill that includes a guest-worker program that relieves business of the job of enforcing our federal immigration laws.

This bill championed by George Bush continues to place onerous demands on business, which should not have to shoulder so much of the burden of enforcing federal immigration law. Still, it's an important step toward resolving an issue that has festered for decades.

Whether it provides "amnesty" is a matter of semantics. A $5,000 fine and a bureaucratic process would ensure it would be years before illegal immigrants could become citizens. Illegal immigrants who have been here since Jan. 1, 2007, could receive "Z visas" renewable every four years, but the head of the household would have to first return to his or her home country before applying for permanent-residence visas, or green cards.

As this issue was going to press, President Bush was making a last-ditch effort to revive the bipartisan immigration bill. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., was among its chief proponents. The bill's reception was bipartisan in every sense of the word--people on both sides of the political fence saw parts of it they didn't like.

But the need to recognize the critical importance of immigrants in the U.S. workforce is neither left nor right. It's necessary, and it's pro-business. We believe a coalition is emerging among businesses in Colorado and much of the nation that is no longer content to define its interests only in terms of Republican and Democrat.

We saw this in Colorado with the campaign to promote Referendum C to voters. That Colorado elder-statesman and Republican Hank Brown was among the effort's biggest champions was hardly an anomaly. The measure to allow the state to keep $3.1 billion in surplus tax money that otherwise would have been refunded to taxpayers and use it to pay...