Shuttle Endeavour - hotmailh.com

We arrived in Tel Aviv at 6pm after a 12 hour direct flight & met up with our guide Uri and our Mossad controller, from there we drove straight to Jerusalem, checked in to the hotel and on to dinner where we met with Yossi Klein Halevi of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. Yossi gave a brief talk followed by a wide ranging dinner discussion that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of his presentation. Everyone enjoyed the evening immensely.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

'It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,' Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. 'If you say they can't get a job when they come here, you'll stop it.'

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens.

'It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people's privacy,' said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. 'We're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification.'

Mr. Graham says he respects those concerns but disagrees. 'We've all got Social Security cards,' he said. 'They're just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That's all I'm saying.'

U.S. employers now have the option of using an online system called E-Verify to check whether potential employees are in the U.S. legally. Many Republicans have pressed to make the system mandatory. But others, including Mr. Schumer, complain that the existing system is ineffective.

Last year, White House aides said they expected to push immigration legislation in 2010. But with health care and unemployment dominating his attention, the president has given little indication the issue is a priority.

Rather, Mr. Obama has said he wanted to see bipartisan support in Congress first. So far, Mr. Graham is the only Republican to voice interest publicly, and he wants at least one other GOP co-sponsor to launch the effort.

An immigration overhaul has long proven a complicated political task. The Latino community is pressing for action and will be angry if it is put off again. But many Americans oppose any measure that resembles amnesty for people who came here illegally.