Two standard phrases crop up the instant that lawmakers, bureaucrats and the media begin to talk about immigration:  Resolve the problem and comprehensive immigration reform.  Talk in Washington about resolving any large-scale challenge is rather ambitious given the city’s ever-steepening warps in its already pockmarked ideological-rhetorical terrain.  Immigration is not an easy subject to talk about dispassionately, and so how Washington gains traction on immigration no doubt will be affected greatly by how lawmakers and the President manage the fast-approaching fiscal cliff.

The 2012 election, it is said, opened Republicans to accept the possibility that they might have to compromise on immigration, something that most of those commonly referred to as the Tea party adamantly oppose.  The corporate side of the Republican equation, however, is in favor of something being done, and corporate America has more of the power now.  It is not surprising that it also is driving a good part of the discussion of how to avert the cliff.

Once immigration moved from the electoral field to the halls of Congress, the balance tipped in favor of corporations whose lobbyists on one hand do not want to prevent cheap labor from coming into the country and on the other want highly skilled workers educated and trained in colleges and universities in the United States from getting out.  That spectrum of desires and the legalization of those in the country already should be the basis for any agreement.

Politics is about the public space – who recognizes it when it changes and who occupies it.  At the moment, the Obama Administration enjoys the space given it by the election, followed by corporations more so than the segment of the population that is xenophobic.  But the window for all involved is narrow, to be complicated by how slippery with blood the floor of the political space remains after the battle over the nation’s finances allows perhaps only intransigence to stand.

In case of stalemate, a larger concept is needed – a grander way to change the perspective with which the average citizen on the street perceives immigration.  The rhetoric has to go beyond the boilerplate language of ‘this is a country of immigrants’ – a historically valuable truth that over the years lost the power that facts usually transmit.  More energy must be infused into the language that pro-legalization forces use to give immigration the value it merits.  Immigration is as important as the elimination of slavery in its day since new immigrants form the nation’s demographic lifeline.  But, unlike slavery, immigration does not impart the same righteous moral equivalence of saving the nation’s democratic lifeline.  Yet at its core, immigration is a vital economic necessity.

Immigration is a matter of national security in a far different way than boorish rhetoric ceaselessly screeching on about ‘securing the border’ – a phrase whose use by lawmakers reveals ignorance of today’s reality along the southern range, now an armed lace of steel and soldier – a new “brown curtain” of sorts.

Leadership requires that leaders lead.  And leaders lead with language.  References to the Statue of Liberty create allegory that is illusory, not allegory that is aspirational for a nation that must come to understand that it now more than ever depends on immigrants.  Better for the political fight ahead are references to reality: That without immigrants there will be no one around to take care of an increasingly elderly population.  That, even in the age of drones, soldiers will be needed still to defend the shores against greater threats than hungry immigrants.  That without immigrants the economy will not have the workers it needs when recovery becomes boom – especially if the nation takes seriously the boon that natural gas affords it to remake its economic future.  That without immigrants to pay taxes, the country’s finances will not just go over a worrisome cliff but collapse into a real abyss as general birth rates decline.

No econometric model exists that could predict or manage the levels of immigration that the country ought to accept depending on the state of the economy.  In reality, we have had such a system in place but it was callously and chaotically managed by market demands and unscrupulous employers.  We should strive for a more scientific model that can accommodate both low-wage agricultural workers from Sinaloa and Senegal and graduate students at Berkley or Bryn Mawr.

Until such a model is procured, we must strive to delimit the negativity with which immigration is loaded.  The facts bear out that immigrants personify nothing less than the future of the country – and they should be spoken about in a way that the American people can view them as a nation building equity in its own future. The framework for the resolution of immigration has to be creative and visionary, not based on cliché.

Even the most recalcitrant elements within the Tea party have the potential to understand the demographic imperative of a nation needing more people in order to remain viable in an ever-growing world.

Achieving that alone with new language could comprise comprehensive immigration reform that resolves the problem.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.