The Senate immigration bill, finally released just in time to roil Congress on Sunday night, offers more political angles than a high-school trigonometry textbook.

The authors of the legislation — Oklahoma conservative Republican Jim Lankford, Arizona’s mercurial independent Kyrsten Sinema and Connecticut liberal Democrat Chris Murphy — deserve plaudits for their plucky determination and their old-fashioned belief in compromise.

During a presidential election year, almost all reactions in Washington are heavily tinged with self-interest. And the one certainty surrounding the compromise legislation is that all political calculations could be wrong.

The risks for Senate supporters of the immigration legislation — including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D.-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — are both short- and long-term.

In the weeks ahead, it would be embarrassing for all of them if the bill collapses in the Senate, proving that the center cannot hold when challenged by a ragtag alliance of right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats.

But there is another hazard, even if the legislation miraculously surmounts the hurdles in both the Senate and the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson says “dead on arrival” with the regularity of a metronome. What if it becomes apparent in a year or two that the first major immigration legislation in this century didn’t work?

It is possible that the border crisis — triggered by climate change, poverty and political instability in Central America — is simply too........

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