Growing up in El Salvador, Candelaria Flores didn’t envision moving to the United States – not until she reached ninth grade and her father said that, as far as further schooling went, “you’re on your own.”

She wanted to become a lawyer. Instead, the choice she saw ahead was marriage and rearing children in the kind of poverty she already knew.

Her sister, who was living in the United States, suggested that Flores venture north, work for two years and then return to El Salvador with enough money to pay for her education.

That was 11 years ago.

As with many immigrants’ plans, life intervened.

Instead of immediately being able to save money, she spent an entire year paying off the fee for being smuggled across the U.S.-Mexican border at Aguas Prietas. After making her way from Arizona to Baltimore, she worked a series of jobs that helped her move up the economic ladder – custodial work, food service, cashiering, the Census 2000 project. She married, became a permanent resident, had a daughter two years ago and got divorced.

Now, as a legal assistant and community organizer for CASA of Maryland, she helps Latino day laborers who’ve not been paid by their employers and who, on their own, have little recourse against unscrupulous bosses.

In many ways, hers is a typical immigrant’s story. In others, it differs significantly.

“We immigrate because we have to, not because we want to, and because we dream of doing something we cannot do back in our country,” Flores told about 30 editorial writers last week at a seminar sponsored by the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

“We need opportunities to have a way to go to study, get a career, get a way to give back to the community,” she said. “Most of the people do want to be working, to learn English, to go back to their countries and visit their families, to make it better.”

A demographer and economists told the group what’s pretty obvious: People come to the United States, legally and illegally, primarily for economic and family reasons. Those who are here without authorization migrate to where the jobs are: in agriculture, cleaning, construction, food preparation, private households, meat and chicken packing, textiles and hotels.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 55 percent of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States sneaked into the country illegally. What gets far less attention is that the other 45 percent arrived legally: Most started out with valid visas and stayed on when those expired; a small percentage came in with border crossing cards but remained illegally.

Two of the biggest challenges for the new Congress will be wrestling with the often misunderstood realities in the U.S. immigration picture and grappling with choices that won’t be easy or popular.

They’ll have to arrive at policies that encourage people to enter the country legally rather than illegally while also deterring employers from skirting the rules to attract cheap labor.

Policies that recognize and accommodate labor needs, protect native workers’ rights and force industries to pay fair wages and operate safely.

Policies that implement an efficient and effective verification system so that employers don’t just wink at fake documents produced for someone’s gain.

Policies that will make it far more difficult for corrupt opportunists to exploit the flaws in our immigration enforcement for crime and profit.

And those policies will need to deal with the millions who for years have invested sweat equity in this country. Those policies must provide a path to legality at the least – and to citizenship for those who want it and are willing to meet requirements of paying back taxes, learning English and wait their turn for processing.

That makes sense on several levels. For one, such people already are contributing to the economy, to their families, to their communities in ways large and small. Second, this addresses the concern about their being here illegally. We set hierarchies of crimes and penalties all the time. Some can be resolved with a fine; not every violation requires jail time or worse.

Comprehensive immigration reform won’t be on the Democrats’ fast-track agenda next year. And it shouldn’t be, because this isn’t – and mustn’t be treated as – a choice between an impenetrable wall and open borders with amnesty for all. Finding the right solutions will take careful crafting and thoughtful debate.

As Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, put it, “The new dimension is going to be, ‘What part of solution don’t you understand?”‘