Fence sitters

PERHAPS THE MOST STRIKING thing about the heated and ongoing national debate on immigration policy has been the extent to which it is taking place within only one of the nation's two major political parties.

A Republican president, along with Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, has led the fight to liberalize the nation's immigration laws, pushing to allow the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants already in the US to become citizens while also creating a guest worker program that would allow hundreds of thousands of foreign workers a year into the country on a temporary basis.

Fellow Republicans have condemned such proposals as a blanket amnesty for people who broke the law in coming here-and who take jobs from American workers. ''Many of those who have stood for the Republican Party for the last decade are not only angry," but feel betrayed, warned Representative J.D. Hayworth of Arizona at a March 29th ''Say No to Amnesty" news conference on the Capitol steps. ''They will be absent in November." Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, on Friday, branded the Republican-brokered Senate compromise bill-now stalled-"miserable public policy."

Throughout the fracas, Democrats have kept fairly quiet. Senator Edward Kennedy has taken an active role, joining McCain in sponsoring the immigration bill that formed the basis of the Senate compromise. But most Democratic lawmakers ''have settled into their seats with popcorn to enjoy the spectacle of Republicans ripping themselves apart," writes veteran political analyst Charlie Cook. ''They are taking care not to interfere any more than necessary, one of the more astute judgments that they have made in a long time."

That Republicans might not agree on immigration is no surprise. The party, after all, has long presented itself as the party of business-which tends to see immigration as a source of cheap, plentiful labor-while at the same time being home to the sort of law-and-order politicians who see illegal immigrants as lawbreakers and agents of social disruption.

It turns out, though, that Democrats are no less divided than Republicans over immigration, according to recent polls from both the Pew Research Center and the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. The best indicators of attitudes on immigration, the polls suggest, are not what party one belongs to, but how rich and educated one is: Wealthier, well-educated Democrats, like wealthier, well-educated Republicans, tend to be more supportive of increases in immigration than less-educated, less-well-off members of either party. Most strikingly, the differences of opinion within each party are greater than the differences between them.

Why is it, then, that only Republican lawmakers, not their Democratic colleagues, seem to reflect the conflicting opinions of their supporters? Some sort of reckoning may be inevitable. ''Immigration is like Iraq," says Ruy Teixeira, a polling analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. ''At some point, you need to say what you think should be done, rather than how your opponent's failing."

The Democratic coalition does have a few cracks on the issue: disagreements between labor unions, ambivalence on the part of traditional civil rights organizations, even a few dozen congressmen who support tough immigration crackdowns. In a mid-term election year-and in the presidential campaign around the corner-could these differences break out into full-blown hostilities, like those in the Republican Party?

In part, Democrats are currently enjoying one of the signal privileges of being in the opposition. According to Michael Barone, a conservative political analyst and lead author of The Almanac of American Politics, Democratic disagreement on immigration ''is not as visible because they're not in power, so they're not driving the issue in the way that Republicans are." Roberto Suro, founding director of the Pew Hispanic Center, puts it another way. ''I would be tempted to think that it's at least partially tactical," he said of the Democrats' relative harmony, ''in that the Republicans jumped first and the Democrats have been somewhat reactive."

According to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party has united the Democrats by vocally staking out a minority position. ''Most Americans are kind of in the middle on immigration," says Lake. ''They're worried about the impact of unlimited immigration on the one hand," but don't want to see mass deportations, either. As a result, most Democrats have seen little risk in criticizing pro-crackdown lawmakers like Tancredo and Wisconsin Representative James Sensenbrenner while supporting some combination of tougher border security and legalization for illegal immigrants already here.

It has helped that organized labor, a traditionally powerful Democratic interest group with a history of hostility to immigration, has decided in recent years to embrace new immigrants as potential union members. For decades, most major unions blamed immigrants for driving down wages, taking jobs from union members, even breaking strikes. But that changed in 2000 when, after a bitter debate, the AFL-CIO (then comprising most of the nation's major unions) began advocating instead for amnesty and legalization for illegal immigrants.

Today, that accord shows signs of fragility. While virtually every union is united in calling for legalization for those illegal immigrants already here, there's been real disagreement over how to respond to future immigrants. Largely Hispanic unions like UNITE HERE and SEIU-both of which recently split off from the AFL-CIO-have supported the McCain-Kennedy bill in its entirety. ''We think it's progress, we think it's headed in the right direction," says Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of SEIU. (UNITE HERE also supports the Senate compromise, while SEIU has yet to take a position on it.) Other unions though, including the AFL-CIO, balk at the McCain-Kennedy guest worker program-concerned, for example, that guest workers themselves would be abused by it.

But these unions are also concerned about the sheer number of new workers such programs can bring in. Ana Avendano, director of the immigrant worker program at the AFL-CIO, characterizes the bill's annual guest worker quota of 400,000, which would increase over time, as a sop to business interests. ''There's certainly no basis," she says, ''based on economic realities, for 400,000, other than the Chamber of Commerce getting exactly what it wanted and feeding labor into the low-wage labor market." The compromise bill brings that number down, and ties its growth to economic indicators. But the prospect of a continuous flow of new laborers still makes some unions uneasy.

''Where would these people go?" asks Bevin Power, a legislative representative at Laborers' International Union of America. ''Would they be moving around from industry to industry? It doesn't seem that anybody has a coherent explanation of what sort of displacement there'd be."

And labor is not the only Democratic interest group with a complicated relationship to immigration. Traditional African-American civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, normally liberal stalwarts, have shown some ambivalence over immigration reform. While they support legalization and amnesty programs, Roberto Suro points out, ''they're certainly not out in front on this issue. Contrast that to 20 or 10 years ago, during the last two big immigration debates. The civil rights organizations and lots of African-American organizations were fairly prominent in opposing restrictions. They're less visible now." When Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a liberal immigration reform bill into the House, only nine members of the 43-member Congressional Black Caucus (of which Lee is a member), signed on to it.

According to Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a Los Angeles-based political analyst, ''many black leaders are looking over their shoulders at a black constituency that is deeply dividend on immigration." When asked about it in polls, African-Americans tend to be less supportive of immigration than whites and to say they believe blacks disproportionately lose jobs to immigrants. A 1994 Los Angeles Times poll, for example, showed that, two months before election day, 64 percent of African-Americans supported Proposition 187, a California ballot initiative to bar illegal immigrants from receiving most forms of state aid. (In the end, after a concerted campaign against the initiative by some civil rights organizations, only 45 percent of black voters actually voted for it.)

If civil rights organizations and unions are ambivalent about immigration, there are a few Democratic lawmakers who are openly hostile to it. In December, Representative John Barrow of Georgia, along with 34 other conservative Democratic congressmen, helped pass an immigration reform bill sponsored by Representative Sensenbrenner that would create a security fence along 700 miles of the US-Mexico border and make both being and aiding an illegal immigrant a felony.

In Barrow's view, the United States is bearing the brunt of a ''tsunami" of immigration, and he doesn't see why the country needs any more immigrants right now. ''We have 11 million illegal aliens we need to do a good job of assimilating into the country first," he says. He refers to measures like Sensenbrenner's as ''tough love with our neighbor to the south."

There's no question, however, that the divisions among Democrats, while real, are less sharp than those on the Republican side. One reason for this may simply be that for all the fire-breathing rhetoric on the issue, most people, Democrat and Republican, aren't that worked up about it. The Pew poll, for example, found that barely a fifth of Americans rated immigration a ''very big" problem in their community, while 42 percent rated it a very big problem for the country (placing it fifth behind healthcare, terrorism, crime, and corrupt politicians). Only 3 percent rated it the country's most important problem.

In the end, Democratic lawmakers may be able to smooth over their differences in an area where Democratic supporters are ambivalent simply because immigration isn't the issue that drives most people to the voting booth. ''There's tremendous frustration with the issue" among Americans, says Frank Sharry executive director of the immigrant advocacy group the National Immigration Forum, ''but it's still not an issue that decides elections."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.