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Thirteen years ago, President George W. Bush welcomed Vicente Fox of Mexico to Washington to lay the groundwork for an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws sensing that fellow Republicans were finally ready to go along with a new legalization effort.

The push included a rare address to Congress on Sept. 6, 2001, when Fox declared that immigrants invariably enrich the cultural life of the land that receives them.

Five days later, jetliners hijacked by foreign terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, heightening security fears and scuttling Bushs immigration plans.

For more than a quarter century, it has never been the right time for immigration reform. And the biggest stumbling block always seems to be concerns, primarily among conservatives, that border controls are not tough enough and must be strengthened further before anything else can be done.

On Wednesday, Obama will travel to Toluca, Mexico, for an economic summit at a time when his own immigration campaign, launched a year ago, has stalled in Congress amid another backlash over the border . White House officials said that Mexican President Enrique Pea Nieto has pledged to do all he can to help, and Obama predicted to Univision that immigration reform will still happen before he leaves office.

But the situation is largely out of Obamas hands, and the latest impasse has frustrated longtime advocates.

When you hear someone say the key to immigration reform is to secure the border, it tells me they either dont understand the issue or theyre just using it as a pretext, Carlos Gutierrez, Bushs former commerce secretary, said in an interview last week. If we secure the border and do not have reform or new a legal system, then the economy is really going to be in trouble.

It is a debate that has raged since President Reagan signed the last major overhaul of immigration laws in 1986, a bipartisan achievement hailed as a solution to the crisis of 5 million immigrants living in the country illegally. The Immigration Reform and Control Act put 2.7 million people on the path toward citizenship, marking the largest legalization program in U.S. history.

But in many ways, the law has been deemed a failure and stands as one of the chief impediments to a new round of reform. The bill denied legal status to more than 2 million others who had recently arrived in the country, and failed to create a guest worker program large enough to handle the surge of workers streaming across the border over the next two decades.

The number of people living in the country illegally rose again quickly, reaching more than 11.7 million last year.

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For more than 25 years, its never been the right time for immigration reform