Kirsten Gillibrand spoke in more detail about her immigration stance in an interview with New York 1. The incoming senator makes clear that she wants to provide more ways for agricultural workers to come to the United States legally, and for family members of immigrants to get visas without such long delays. Her position is still very different from that of Sen. Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton, starting with her use of the touchy word “amnesty.”

“I think amnesty is the wrong approach,” she said. Gillibrand, who will be sworn in tomorrow, described two specific things she wanted to do: clear the backlogs for family-sponsored immigration down to one year or less; and offer five-year visas for agricultural workers that could eventually lead to U.S. citizenship. (This sounds like an entirely new kind of visa; the existing H-2A agricultural visas are strictly temporary, without a path to citizenship.) She objected to past proposals that would have workers return to their home country to renew a visa. Those workers would be unlikely to go home, she said, and would only create a new pool of illegal immigrants after two years.

She was not asked the big, dicey question of what should be done with regard to the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States. Certainly “amnesty” is out, and I take that as a rejection of any “earned legalization” — the idea, twice rejected in the Senate, of setting up a series of legal hoops for undocumented immigrants to jump through in return for legal status. (The word amnesty, suggesting an outright giveaway, has long been abandoned by politicians who favor a comprehensive overhaul.)

Anyway, her position clearly has supporters, despite the criticism from groups like the New York Immigration Coalition. Along with receiving comments on this blog, I just took a call from a woman in Ohio who saw our story yesterday in The Journal News. Any notion of granting legal status to illegal immigrants is unfair and wrong, and there’s no way around that, she said.

“There’s nothing good about illegals living in our communities. We’re suffering. We’re going without work,” she said. “In no way does illegal immigration benefit the average American.”