Instead, the immigration event will be small and private and will include only House and Senate members involved in the immigration debate.
Moreover, the White House is careful to point out that Obama wants to merely begin the debate this year. He is not promising that a plan will be passed this year, although in his campaign he said he would make the issue "a top priority in my first year as president." Since then, Obama has made it clear that he has two primary legislative goals for the year - a health care overhaul and a global warming bill.
Both proposals are already putting many swing-district Democrats in a political bind.
Still, some vocal Latino activists, led by Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, have pledged to keep applying pressure.
Emma Lozano, an activist who is married to one of Gutierrez's congressional staffers, is organizing a demonstration to take place outside the White House during the immigration meeting, and Gutierrez has promised to tell demonstrators immediately after the meeting what the president said or did not say.
"We need to hear, 'This is what we're for, and this is the timeline,' " Gutierrez said. "This has got to happen this year. ... Everybody in the House and the Senate is waiting for a signal from the White House."
In recent elections, some party leaders, including now-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, were advising Democratic candidates in swing districts to steer clear of immigration, or take a hard line by calling for stricter border enforcement and regulation of employers.
Surveys in swing districts presented to Democratic candidates by pollster Stanley Greenberg portrayed support for legalization as a political risk.
But Obama's success with Latinos last year has prompted some Democrats to find a rhetorical middle ground, as has the widespread belief that the party's political dominance relies in part on solidifying its standing with the Latino bloc.
Greenberg produced new swing-district polling last summer to counter his earlier surveys - this time reporting that "a policy and message that focuses on requiring illegal immigrants to become legal expands the Democratic advantage on the immigration issue." He said that pushing a "legal status requirement" is more popular than simply talking about border enforcement.
One senior Democrat intent on acting this year is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who faces a re-election campaign in Nevada, where Latinos are a fast-growing constituency. He has pledged to push legislation in the fall.
But prior efforts have failed in the Senate. And with the measure's long-standing champions, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, no longer taking the lead, strategists say that success is possible only if Obama steps in.
Some strategists believe the most likely time to press the issue will be in 2011, when Obama, once again needing Latino votes to win states such as Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, will be most motivated to lobby nervous Democrats on behalf of a legalization plan.
