The scarcity of jobs, the growth of the Latino vote and the legislation in Arizona have all contributed to creating an atmosphere in which the public says that progress on this issue is overdue.

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Fifty-nine percent of the general population wants to see action on meaningful reform, and so do 76 percent of D.C. elites. More notable in today’s partisan climate is that reform gets the nod from Democrats and independents in equal measure (61 percent of both think Congress should “pass comprehensive immigration law guidelines now”) and that 59 percent of Republicans agree as well.

This has to be seen in light of voters who are unhappy with the stimulus, unhappy with the health care bill and unhappy with the direction of the Congress — and yet they want Congress to take up this controversial issue that has eluded compromise despite having been promised by former President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.

The failure to get any major new legislation on immigration since 1996 is a sign of the breakdown of bipartisanship. When President Bill Clinton passed a balanced budget and welfare reform, he also passed limited immigration reform that allowed the building of the border fence and opened the doors to citizenship for some.

But absent that kind of bipartisan, centrist spirit, all attempts to get this done on a broader scale since then have quickly fallen apart. The Republican right wants fairly extreme measures against the undocumented aliens already here and refuses to create a path to citizenship; the left opposes the kind of crackdowns favored by the right and wants a more automatic path to citizenship. So with both the left and the right dead set against a compromise, no president has been able to keep his promise on this topic.

This is an issue that can be solved only through a centrist effort that would bring together moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats into a grand bargain on all of the major issues. The left and the right would vote down any likely compromise, but there probably would be enough votes in the center to get it done in a common-sense, nonpartisan way. But that’s the rub — there is no political mechanism in today’s polarized environment for bringing together the kind of cross-caucus coalition necessary to pass a bill. And perhaps this illustrates exactly why the voters are so sour on Congress — they now perceive it as an institution that can’t overcome partisan divides to find solutions to today’s growing and intractable problems outside of the red/blue framework.