After a Memorial Day week spent back home with their constituents backers of the Senate Immigration bill are more optimistic about its passage so long as it stays in its current form.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who led negotiations on the bill for his party, said the flood of angry calls and protests that greeted the deal two weeks ago has since receded every day.

“You just have to recognize you will get 300 calls, you’ll get conflicts at town hall meetings — all of them negative,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who consulted with Kyl and hopes to carry a similar deal through the House in July. “The last few days have really turned things around.”

Public opinion polls seem to support Kyl’s contention that Americans are far more open to the deal than the voices of opposition would indicate. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released today, 52 percent of Americans said they would support a program giving illegal immigrants the right to stay and work in the United States if they pay a fine and meet other requirements. Opposition to that proposal was 44 percent.

So far, the dozen senators who cut the deal have been able to hold their compromise together. They have beaten back amendments that the group deemed to be coalition-killers, such as one to strike the bill’s temporary-worker program and another to remove its provisions to legalize the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

This week’s amendments are more subtle, and therefore, more threatening to the coalition.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) will push to make the Department of Homeland Security consider more of the family-based immigration applications that have already been filed, adding 833,000 immigrants. Kyl said he will withdraw his support for the bill if the amendment passes.

He also said he will walk away if Menendez and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) win passage of an amendment that would more than double the number of green cards available under the bill for the parents of U.S. citizens. Kyl said conservatives believe today’s family unification system is being misused by illegal immigrants, whose U.S.-born children are citizens.

Such amendments will be difficult to resist for the compromise’s chief Democratic architect, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), who helped create the family unification system in 1965 and whom conservatives are now counting on to help dismantle it.

Republicans in the coalition will be expected to oppose amendments that put them in equally difficult positions. One, sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), would expand the list of crimes making illegal immigrants ineligible for legalization. Cornyn has emphasized infractions such as gang activity and “aggravated felonies.”

Democrats say the list would virtually wipe out the legalization program by barring undocumented workers who ignored deportation orders, overstayed their visas or otherwise evaded immigration authorities.

In addition, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) would like to prohibit illegal immigrants who are legalized under the law from obtaining the earned-income tax credit to bolster low-income work.

I don’t support anything that would make it easier for illegals to become citizens, and it does seem to me we shouldn’t be passing out citizenship papers to people who have broken our laws and shoved it in our faces. Cornyn’s concerns seem legitimate to me.

The fact remains we have to start someplace, and if I’m not wrong, this bill does include securing the borders. If they can actually do that then I think that’s a big step in the right direction.

One thing I would love to see in this bill is an unconditional pardon for the Border Patrol agents who have been incarcerated for doing their jobs. Let them out free unless they committed a genuine act of murder.

This business of bringing illegals back into this country for medical treatment for wounds that may or may not have been made by the border patrol agents in the line of duty so they can testify against the border patrol agents is incomprehensible to me. Then the illegal drug-runners have the gall to sue us for damages.

Adding an unconditional pardon for these border patrol agents to the bill would be the right thing to do and I’d like to see it done.

This should only be the beginning of dealing with the illegals in our country. There should be further steps taken once the border is secure to make sure we don’t have to face this problem in another twenty years.