There have been relatively few sane proposals from the U.S. presidential candidates when it comes to immigration reform. Last week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders released his first policy paper on the topic, which was praised as the first turn from insanity on the campaign trail's hottest-button issue.

Meanwhile, Congress and the Obama administration continue to lock horns, and states are growing impatient.

Several states with both Republican and Democrat legislatures are opting not to wait for national reform. Instead, they’ve been asking the federal government to let them craft their own guest-worker programs for undocumented persons.

“There might be a way forward, if Congress enacts legislation to give states standing waivers or permission to craft their own guest-worker programs,” Shikha Dalmia writes for the Wall Street Journal. “It sounds radical, but several states, red and blue, have already been trying to do this.”

Dalmia cites Canada’s “Provincial Nominee Program” as a successful example. Kansas, New Mexico and California have already moved the needle on state-level guest-worker visa legislation in the U.S., and Texas lawmakers have drafted similar bills.

But at the end of the day, immigration remains a federal procedure. Utah’s two-year guest-worker visa proposal has been stalled for over four years now. States still require federal waivers in order to grant any sort of immigration status.

To circumvent vent this — as well as the partisan horn-locking on Capitol Hill — Congress would need to erect “a statutory architecture under which states could implement their own guest-worker programs,” the Wall Street Journal notes.

“America’s immigration debate has become distressingly focused on militarizing the border and draconian interior enforcement,” Dalmia adds, referencing the outlandish anti-immigration rhetoric on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. “Letting states experiment with different immigration strategies offers a realistic compromise in line with conservative principles.”