They had to call for legalizing illegal workers without admitting they employed any in their own work sites.
Business leaders said they were troubled to find themselves on the wrong side of Republican lawmakers who had long been their allies. One of the most active companies behind the bill was Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's largest chicken company, with 56,500 workers, based in Pittsburg, Texas.
Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both Republicans of Texas, voted to kill the bill.
Cliff Butler, vice chairman of Pilgrim's Pride, said he was dismayed by calls from the bill's opponents for stepped-up deportation of illegal immigrants.
"I was surprised by how little import was given to the impact of that on millions of good people, and what it would to our economy to remove that labor force," Butler said. "They just ignored that totally."
Farmers and construction contractors said they anticipated labor shortages. They worried that they would have to continue to rely on the existing system for verifying the immigration status of new hires, which is known as Basic Pilot, even though it is error-prone and inefficient. Swift had participated for years in the program before the raids last year.
Farming and farmworker groups were slightly more optimistic. A proposal for a temporary worker program for agriculture, known as AgJobs, was incorporated into the Senate bill. Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein of California said she would seek to revive AgJobs in coming months by attaching it to other legislation.
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