Labor and business leaders have agreed in principle on the details of a new visa program for low-skilled foreign workers, clearing the last major hurdle for a bipartisan Senate proposal to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, a person involved in the negotiations said Saturday. 
 
 The agreement came late Friday after several days of negotiations between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor organization, as well as the eight senators involved in drafting the comprehensive immigration bill. 
 
 The two sides agreed on how to overcome the final sticking points, including how much the foreign workers would be paid and which industries would be exempt from the guest-worker program. Final approval came in a phone call Friday night arranged by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) with Chamber president Thomas Donohue and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, said the person involved in the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. 
 
 Trumka said in a statement Saturday night: “We have created a new model, a modern visa system that includes both a bureau to collect and analyze labor market data, as well as significant worker protections.” He also reiterated the AFL-CIO’s support for the overall reform effort, including the path to citizenship for undocumented migrants. 
 
 But the complexity of the matter was highlighted when one member of the business community said Saturday afternoon that the lead negotiators on the business side had not seen written details of a final agreement and cautioned that declaring the matter resolved was premature. 
 
 “Business groups are still waiting to see the details. I don’t know where it’s coming from,” the business official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. “I don’t want to blow this up at all, but to say everyone’s signed off on this is getting ahead of ourselves.” 
 
 Members of the Senate working group also declined to confirm the deal. Alex Conant, a spokesman for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), wrote on his Twitter account, “Senate negotiators are making good progress on immigration reform, but we’re not done yet.” 
 
 A spokesman for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) declined to comment Saturday. 
 
 The person who disclosed the guest-worker deal said that all eight senators had not formally signed off on the terms but said that could happen over the next few days because all had been briefed at each stage of the talks. 
 
 The guest-worker dispute was considered the final major impasse that threatened to delay the immigration bill that the Senate working group hopes to unveil in the second week of April. Senate aides, who will begin writing the hundreds of pages of legislation this week, cautioned that nothing in the deal is final until the four Democrats and four Republicans in the group have agreed to all portions of the written document. 
 
 In addition to the guest-worker program, the Senate bill will feature a 13-year path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, increases in the number of visas for highly skilled tech workers, elimination of some categories of family visas and increases in border control and workplace security, people familiar with the talks have said. 
 
 Though a number of smaller points are unresolved, Senate aides said they are hopeful that a bill can be introduced in the Judiciary Committee in time to be moved onto the Senate floor by Memorial Day. The goal would be to have a vote of the full Senate by the August recess, the aides said. The House has a proposal developed by its own bipartisan group that also could be unveiled in the next few weeks. 
 
 President Obama, who has made immigration reform the top priority of his second term, has said he hopes to sign a comprehensive bill this year. In 2007, a dispute between business and labor over a guest-worker provision helped sink a bipartisan immigration bill in the Senate. The president has not taken a position on a guest-worker program this year. 
 
 According to the person who disclosed the guest-worker deal, Schumer called White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to inform him of the deal. The administration had mostly remained out of the daily negotiations as business and labor tried to work out the deal under the Senate’s guidance. 
 
 A White House spokesman said in a statement Saturday that the president “continues to be encouraged by progress being made by the bipartisan group of Senators,” adding, “We look forward to seeing language once it is introduced, and expect legislation to move forward as soon as possible.” 
 
 Businesses had lobbied for 400,000 new visas under the new program, but labor unions wanted far fewer because of concerns that such a system would negatively affect wages and benefits for American workers. 
 
 Under the Senate’s proposal, businesses would be allowed starting in April 2015 to hire 20,000 foreign workers for low-skilled jobs in a new “W visa” program — the number rising to 75,000 in 2019, according to people familiar with the details. 
 
 After that, the number would rise and fall each year depending on recommendations from a new “Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research,” which would analyze employment data. Those familiar with the talks said it would take many years before the visa program would approach the annual proposed cap of 200,000 foreign workers. 
 
 Meanwhile, construction industries would be limited to no more than 15,000 visas annually and would be banned from hiring any foreign guest workers for more highly skilled technical jobs such as electrician positions. 
 
 The Chamber and AFL-CIO agreed to a wage scale that would pay foreigners the greater of actual or prevailing wages. It would be based partly on a formula that takes into account actual wages paid by the employer to similarly situated U.S. workers, as well as regional and industry scales. 
 
 Companies, except in the construction industry, could hire workers beyond the annual caps if they were willing to pay significantly higher wages. 
 
 Union officials declined to comment Saturday. Blair Latoff Holmes, a spokeswoman for the Chamber, confirmed that Schumer and Donohue spoke Friday but said she did not know whether Donohue had spoken with Trumka. She declined to comment on whether a deal had been reached. 
 
 “The senators will make the decisions about any final agreements and what makes the best public policy overall,” Holmes said in an e-mail. 
 
 Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums. ||||| A last-minute dispute over wages for lower-skilled workers flared Friday as senators scrambled to sketch out a deal on a sweeping immigration bill before Congress takes a two-week recess. 
 
 FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2013, file photo, before the New York skyline, a group of immigrant rights advocates gather near Ellis Island in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, N.J. A dispute between business... (Associated Press) 
 
 The public clash between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO underscored the high stakes involved in legislation that would dramatically reshape the U.S. immigration and employment landscape, putting 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship while allowing tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers into the country. 
 
 The chamber and AFL-CIO, negotiating through the so-called Gang of Eight senators, had reached significant agreement on a new visa program to bring up to 200,000 lower-skilled workers a year to the country. The number of visas would fluctuate according to demand, and the workers would be able to change jobs and could seek permanent residency. 
 
 But the AFL-CIO was pushing for higher wages for the workers than the chamber had agreed to so far. 
 
 The dispute remained unsettled into the night, with chamber officials finally saying talks seemed to have stalled. Senators hoped to keep the disagreement from derailing negotiations on the overall bill. 
 
 The eight senators in the negotiating group, including Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John McCain, R-Ariz., were aiming to finalize as many details as possible before leaving town so that the recess could be devoted to drafting the legislation, which would then be made public when the lawmakers return in April. 
 
 "We're close," Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., another member of the group, said after one round of meetings Friday. "The biggest issue has always been the future flow" of workers. Flake said there were only "a few minor items" left to deal with apart from the Chamber of Commerce-AFL-CIO matter. 
 
 If that can't be resolved in a way the two sides can agree to, the expectation is that the senators would come to their own agreement on the issue and include it in the bill, and hope the chamber and AFL can live with it or modify it as the bill moves through committee and Senate floor action. 
 
 The AFL-CIO argued that the Chamber of Commerce was trying to pay below median wage for any given group of workers, but the chamber said it would pay about the same as American workers get. 
 
 In the case of housekeepers, for example, the chamber proposal would mean $8.44 per hour, which falls below the federal poverty level for a family of four, while the AFL-CIO position was $11.39 per hour, according to one official familiar with the labor perspective who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations. The new visas would cover dozens of professions such as long-term care workers and hotel and hospitality employees. Currently there's no good way for employers to bring many such workers to the U.S.; an existing visa program for low-wage nonagricultural workers is capped at 66,000 per year and is supposed to apply only to seasonal or temporary jobs. 
 
 As the day wore on, senators met hour after hour in a private chamber just off the Senate floor, and the chamber and AFL-CIO traded jabs, each accusing the other side of imperiling negotiations. 
 
 A proposal from the Gang of Eight that would divide the workers into three wage categories _ two of them beneath median wage _ was rejected by the AFL as insufficient, said Ana Avendano, assistant to the AFL-CIO president for immigration and community action. Avendano said the AFL proposed language stipulating that the new visas only should be used when employing foreign workers would not hurt wages and working conditions of U.S. workers, but that Republicans rejected that. 
 
 "It's shocking to us that the Republicans are willing to hold up the bill and they're saying that this bill is not moving forward without poverty level wages," Avendano said. "So we're hopeful that they will see the light and recognize how important this issue is and agree to move forward." 
 
 Randy Johnson, the chamber's senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits, said the chamber simply wanted to stick with current law requiring that temporary workers be paid whichever is greater: what comparable American workers make or the prevailing wage as determined by the Labor Department. 
 
 "The unions have jeopardized the entire immigration reform effort, which would provide a pathway to legalization and citizenship for the 10-11 million undocumented workers, because of their refusal to take a responsible stance on a small temporary worker program," Johnson said in a statement. 
 
 McCain said the last-minute scuffle was understandable. 
 
 "People have a lot at stake here, this is a huge deal. We're talking about the lives of 11 million people just to start with, so I understand why passions are high and sentiments are high," McCain told reporters Friday. 
 
 "We just make steady progress," he said. "We take two steps forward, and then we take a step back." 
 
 A separate visa program for agricultural workers also remained unsettled but was not exciting as much concern. 
 
 McCain and Flake plan to visit the Arizona border next Wednesday with Schumer and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., another Gang of Eight member, to inspect conditions there as they finalize their bill. The legislation would impose new border security requirements before any path to citizenship could begin, which is critical to Republicans in the group.
– America's top labor and business groups reached an agreement last night over the final sticking point in overhauling the country's immigration laws, the Washington Post reports. Talking to Sen. Charles Schumer on a conference call, the AFL-CIO's boss and the president of the US Chamber of Commerce agreed in principle on a visa program for foreign workers. All eight senators involved in drafting the bill have not yet signed off, but may soon because they were briefed as negotiations developed, a source tells the Post. Businesses had wanted 400,000 new visas in the program, but labor wanted a much lower number to protect the benefits and wages of US workers. The Senate had proposed allowing 20,000 low-skilled guest workers in the first year, 75,000 by 2020, and 200,000 after several more years, according to insiders. Capital and labor have also agreed on a pay scale for low-skilled immigrant workers, pegging it at the prevailing industry wage used in the last foreign worker program, reports the New York Times.