Facing Deportation but Clinging to Life in U.S., By Julia Preston (NYT)

WAUKEGAN, Ill. — She is a homeowner, a taxpayer, a friendly neighbor and an American citizen. Yet because she is married to an illegal immigrant, these days she feels like a fugitive.

Whenever her Mexican husband ventures out of the house, “it makes me sick to my stomach,” said the woman, who insisted on being identified only by a first name and last initial, Miriam M.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, he took too long,’ ” she said. “I’ll start calling. I go into panic.”

Over the last year, thousands of illegal immigrants and their families who live here have retreated from community life in Waukegan, a microcosm of a growing underground of illegal immigrants across the country who are clinging to homes and jobs despite the pressure of tougher federal and local enforcement.

From Illinois to Georgia to Arizona, these families are hiding in plain sight, to avoid being detected by immigration agents and deported. They do their shopping in towns distant from home, avoid parties and do not take vacations. They stay away from ethnic stores, forgo doctor’s visits and meetings at their children’s schools, and postpone girls’ normally lavish quinceañeras, or 15th birthday parties.

They avoid the police, even hesitating to report crimes.

“When we leave in the morning we know we are going to work,” said Elena G., a 47-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant and Waukegan resident of eight years who works in a factory near here. “ But we don’t know if we will be coming home.”

Last year, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 35,000 illegal immigrants, including unauthorized workers and immigration fugitives, more than double the number in 2006. They sent 276,912 immigrants back to their home countries, a record number.

Since about three-quarters of an estimated 11.3 million illegal immigrants nationwide are from Latin America, and many have spouses, children or other relatives who are legal immigrants and citizens, the sense of alarm has spread broadly among Hispanics.

A survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, found in December that 53 percent of Hispanics in the United States worry that they or a loved one could be deported.

Stores catering to Hispanic immigrants in places like Atlanta and Cincinnati have closed because of the drop in customers. Michael L. Barrera, president of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said anecdotal reports had indicated that small storefront businesses had been the hardest hit by a sharp decline in spending by immigrants.

“The raids have really spooked them in a big way,” said Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton demographer who has studied Mexican immigrants for three decades.

Based on his own surveys and recent reports from other scholars doing field research in the Southwest and in North Carolina and other states, Professor Massey said the “palpable sense of fear and of traumatization” in immigrant communities was more intense than at any other time since the mass deportations of Mexican farm workers in 1954.

Federal immigration officials say that stepped-up enforcement over the last year by the Bush administration and some local authorities has persuaded growing numbers of illegal immigrants to return home. But in places like Waukegan, a racially mixed middle-class suburb north of Chicago, most have chosen to stay, held by families and jobs.

This city has been an immigrant landing for generations. Latinos have been coming since the 1960s and now are 40 percent of the population of 91,000. The number of illegal immigrants among them swelled in the last decade.

Despite their illegal status, those immigrants found steady jobs in factories and landscaping. Lacking Social Security numbers, they used Internal Revenue Service taxpayer numbers to open stores and businesses, enroll in the community college and take out bank loans to buy cars and homes.

The welcome began to fade four years ago, when the city government increased fines and penalties for driving without a license. Since Illinois requires a valid Social Security number for a license, many illegal immigrants lost their cars when they could not afford the fees for impounded vehicles.

Last summer the City Council voted to enter an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency, to train Waukegan police officers to initiate deportations of immigrants who were convicted felons. While city officials insisted the officers would handle only cases of imprisoned criminals, rumors spread that the traffic police would check the immigration status of anyone they stopped.

Also, in recent months federal immigration agents conducted two big raids nearby.

“People came to me and said, ‘Father, when did we become the enemy?’ ” said the Rev. Gary M. Graf, a Roman Catholic priest whose Waukegan parish includes many Latino immigrants.

City officials said that the tougher traffic ordinances were not intended to single out illegal immigrants or Hispanics, but to reduce accidents with uninsured drivers.

“The only reason we did it was for safety,” Mayor Richard H. Hyde said. “We don’t want anybody on the road that doesn’t have a license.”

Nonetheless, for many residents fear has become a daily companion. One woman, a 37-year-old naturalized citizen who was born in Central America but grew up in Waukegan, has decided to stay away from the city even though her mother still lives here. The woman, a lawyer practicing in the Chicago area, fell in love with an illegal immigrant from Guatemala.

After they were married in 2004, she realized that under immigration law it would be difficult for him to become legal, even though she is a citizen. Because he had crossed the border illegally, seeking legal status would require him to return to Guatemala for years of separation, with no guarantee of success. She abandoned plans to move back to Waukegan. She and her husband feel safer in Chicago, with its large Hispanic population.

“I know everything about Waukegan; it’s my town,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because of her husband’s status. “I know the high school, the first Mexican restaurant. I should feel free to go in and out whenever I want to. But it’s not the same freedom anymore.”

Raimundo V., 30, an illegal Mexican immigrant who has lived here for 13 years, said he canceled repairs on his home, which he owns, stopped buying in local stores, and was trying to save as much money as he could in case he should be arrested and deported.

“My expectation here is to be prepared for anything that comes,” Raimundo said.

Miriam M. and her husband, married in 2004, own a tidy house on a peaceful street and are raising four children from previous marriages, all United States citizens. He runs his own landscaping company, paying business and property taxes.

Even though Miriam M. is a citizen, it is difficult for her husband to obtain legal papers, since he entered illegally from Mexico 12 years ago. She did not focus on her husband’s illegal status when she first met him.

“Boyfriend and girlfriend, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “All right, maybe I didn’t want to think much about it.”

Now he stays close to home and avoids downtown Waukegan, driving around the city limits when he can.

Another immigrant, L. Gómez, 36, a Colombian recently on her way to becoming legal, said she had gone to the police and the courts in years past for protection from a violent husband. Since the crackdown, she said, she has avoided the authorities, even when her husband threatened her.

Hispanic business owners in Waukegan complain of a sales slump that they said went beyond the effects of a sluggish national economy.

“People are turning away from Waukegan business and going elsewhere to invest or to buy,” said Porfirio García, a Mexican-American who is president of Exit/Re-Gar Realty, a real estate brokerage firm.

At the Belvidere Mall, which caters to Hispanic customers, María Sotelo, a legal Mexican immigrant, said she was closing her store there after 17 years because her sales dropped in the last six months to $500 a week from $5,000. She sold satin and voile dresses for quinceañera parties and T-shirts from Mexican soccer teams.

“Since it all started with immigration, people don’t come here anymore,” Ms. Sotelo said.

Mr. Hyde and other city officials said they expected to wait several years before Congress adopted new laws to control illegal immigration. Meanwhile, the mayor said, he will do what he can by enforcing local law.

“Do I believe in closing the borders?” Mr. Hyde said. “Do I believe in putting troops down there? You bet your life. Illegal is illegal, and that’s the end of the conversation, really.”

**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Blazing Arizona (NYT)

On Jan. 1, Arizona intends to become the first state to try to muscle its way out of its immigration problems on its own. That is when, barring a last-minute setback in court, it is to begin enforcing a new state law that harshly punishes businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. It is a two-strike law, suspending a business’s license on the first offense and revoking it on the second. It is the strictest workplace-enforcement law in the country.

We have always said that workplace laws should be enforced vigorously — as part of a comprehensive, nationwide immigration system that doesn’t just punish, but tries to actually solve the problems that foster and sustain the breaking of immigration laws. The boosters of the Arizona law, including the Minutemen border vigilantes who have made “January First!” an anti-immigrant rallying cry, have a much narrower goal: the biggest purge of illegal immigrants in the Southwest since the federal government’s Operation Wetback in 1954.

If that happens, the immigrants will take a big chunk of Arizona’s growth and economic vitality with them — and not necessarily back across the international border. The collateral damage will be severe as citizens and legal immigrants are also thrown out of work, as businesses struggle to find workers in a state with a 3.3 percent unemployment rate and as sleazy employers move more workers off the books, the better to abuse and exploit them. And the national problem of undocumented immigration will be no closer to a solution.

There are many compassion-and-common-sense criticisms of Arizona’s Fair and Legal Employment Act: stories about families torn apart, breadwinners deported and citizen children on public assistance. They make little headway with the law-and-order crowd. Nor does the fact that many hard-line defenders of workplace enforcement show a lopsided devotion to federal laws; they seldom complain when employers abuse undocumented immigrants and steal their wages, even though those violations worsen job conditions and pay for American workers, too.

For now, let’s just point out that Arizona’s plunge into enforcement-only immigration policy highlights the folly and inadequacy of that approach, particularly when it is left to a crazy quilt of state laws. America is a country where millions of illegal immigrants have entered for years all but invited and mostly not pursued. They have become integral to our economy, although now — thanks to harsher enforcement and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress — most have no way to become legal, no options except slipping back into destitution on the other side of the border.

There is no way for Arizona or any other state to get businesses back on a legal footing without exacting a great economic and human toll.

It could be that Arizona’s enforcement of the law will be calm and measured. But we worry about Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s population. Maricopa’s county attorney, Andrew Thomas, and county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, are prone to media-driven stunts. Sheriff Arpaio makes a show of his meanness, hounding and humiliating prisoners and forming his deputies into squads that check people’s clothes and accents before demanding their papers.

Arizona is home to many moderate politicians, like Gov. Janet Napolitano, who were all too aware of the bill’s problems, and yet it became law. Many say the Minutemen and their allies had offered an ultimatum: approve this bill or face a citizen’s initiative on the 2008 ballot that would be even harsher and blunter, and all but impossible to repair. That promise was reneged on; petitions for the Minutemen’s initiative are being collected now.

As Arizona exacts its punishment on the undocumented workers who have made it so prosperous, it runs the risk of proving itself tough but not smart.

**Story Link

American Apparel: Recently Published Ad in The New York Times

"America's immigration system is outdated, unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border." - President George Bush, State of the Union Address, February 5, 2005

At American Apparel, we agreed with the President's call for immigration reform, so why has nothing been done for the last three years?

It's time to give a voice to the voiceless. Businesses are afraid to speak to the media about immigration, frightened of reprisals by government agencies. But we cannot just sit in the shadows and watch the government and politicians exploit and misrepresent this matter to advance their own careers.

Over 12 million human beings have become integral to our society, economy and culture here in the USA, yet they do so in legal purgatory. While no serious political voice calls to send them back to their previous home countries, very few have the courage to admit that the only realistic option is some form of legal integration, coupled with a legitimate, forward-thinking immigration policy.

Migration and economic experts generally agree that the productivity and hard work of immigrants improves the economy, makes goods more affordable and available to US citizens, and created more jobs for US workers. Immigrants not only increase the wealth of the nation, they have contributed significantly to major scientific, medical and industrial advancements, as well as to the arts. Many of them have become great entrepreneurs too.

At what point are we going to recognize that the status quo amounts to an apartheid system? At what point will America stop living in a state of denial?

At American Apparel we support our workers. We support our community. We support Los Angeles. We support the pride of America and the American Dream.

Enough is enough.

It's time to Legalize LA, and Legalize the USA.

A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones, By (NYT)

JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic — The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man’s promised land.

They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.

Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned “devil” and deported him four times.

Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Mr. Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.

“We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor,” he said. “When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken.”

Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.

They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They usually move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.

There are 74 million “south to south” migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved “south to north,” or from poor countries to rich ones.)

Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.

“South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,” said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.”

The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.

Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.

As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.

“There is no justice here,” Mr. Moises said.

Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti’s failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.

“Ay-yai-yai-yai,” said Gen. Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. “That wall they’re building — it would be longer and taller.”

Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.

The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet cafe. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are filled with trash and pigs.

Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians’ return.

Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler’s truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler’s truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.

Unwritten Rules

The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Mr. Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.

“We do not intervene in the workplace,” said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. “We understand the needs of the agricultural sector.” He acknowledged that the situation “benefits the landowner.”

Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.

Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.

Mr. Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. “We can only thank them because they helped us,” he said.

Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers “need us to work.” Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. “It’s a business they have,” he said.

“We are living in their country,” he said. “We have to take it.”

Colliding Interests

Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope. Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians’ problems was to promote development in Haiti and urged the United States to do more. “The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn’t come,” he said. By providing jobs, he said, “we do more than the whole international community combined.”

Some south to south migrants are “pushed” by wars and political crises. Others are “pulled” by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.

Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.

That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. “Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don’t treat immigrants well themselves,” he said.

Egyptian police officers killed 26 Sudanese migrants last year in an attack on their squatter camp. An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he “hated” the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as “Nicas.” In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.

Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.

“Destination countries benefit from foreign labor,” Mr. Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that “promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families.”

“Just letting migration happen is not good enough,” he added.

The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found “a profound and entrenched problem of racism.”

Who Is a Citizen?

One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors “in transit.” But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit — though some lived in the country for decades — and therefore their children had no citizenship rights.

Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier. They also said the government was using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.

Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.

“We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian,” said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.

“Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” he added. “We are overwhelmed.”

For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.

Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler’s truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.

He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.

His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Mr. Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. “I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I’m not going back again.”

He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Richard Perry (NYT): "Dajabón, a Dominican border town, opens its gated bridge twice a week to allow Haitians to buy goods unavailable in their country."

For Republicans, Contest's Hallmark Is Immigration, By Jonathan Weisman (WP)

The imagery of the mailings is designed to pack a wallop: a Mexican flag fluttering above the Stars and Stripes, the Statue of Liberty presiding over a "Welcome Illegal Aliens" doormat, a Social Security card emblazoned with the name "Juan Doe," a U.S. passport proclaiming, "Only one candidate has a plan to STAMP out illegal immigration."

As Republican presidential candidates troll for votes, they have flooded mailboxes in Iowa and New Hampshire with such loaded images. Their campaigns have filled the airwaves, packed their Web sites and taunted their adversaries, proclaiming their concern over porous borders and accusing opponents of insufficient vigilance.

No issue has dominated the Republican presidential nomination fight the way illegal immigration has. Under consistent attack for inconsistent conservatism, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has turned to the issue again and again to shore up his conservative credentials. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, running as the law-and-order candidate, has been forced onto the defensive by immigration policies in his city.

And just days after he delivered a passionate defense of the humanity of undocumented children in a Republican debate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee presented one of the most punitive immigration platforms seen in this campaign season, rejecting legislation to provide the children of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they finish high school, attend two years of college or join the military.

Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney have all used illegal immigration to try to prove to voters that they are the toughest and most conservative candidates in the field. And they have used it with brutal consistency in an attempt to marginalize Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose vocal support for legislation to clamp down on border security while offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship helped cost him his front-runner status.

Romney, despite facing criticism about some of his own immigration policies in Massachusetts and the fact that he was forced to dismiss a company that tended his lawn after it was revealed that it employed illegal immigrants, has attacked all of his rivals on the issue. A new CNN poll shows Romney with sizable advantages over the competition on the handling of illegal immigration, with a lead of 17 percentage points over Huckabee on the matter.

"You have a strong field, but their strengths and weaknesses cancel each other out. No one candidate is standing out as particularly stronger than the rest of the field or more conservative than the rest of the field," said Ken Mehlman, President Bush's former campaign manager, who spent years courting Latino voters for the Republican cause. "And in that dynamic, the desire is to stand up on every issue and say, 'I'm the strongest, and I'm the most conservative.' "

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the debate over immigration, he said.

The strategy poses a real risk. As the rhetoric and the policy proposals have grown increasingly strident, the eventual nominee's ability to win Latino support in swing states such as Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico may be coming increasingly into question.

"For Republican primary politics, this may be the most significant issue. Clearly, there is a segment that is hotly anti-immigrant, and they're very engaged," said Cecilia Mu¿oz, senior vice president for public policy at the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino political organization. "But I don't understand what these guys are going to say to my community when it's time to run" a general-election campaign.

But if Republicans can focus the debate on law-breaking, border security and the strain that illegal immigrants are placing on public services, the issue could also place a wedge between many Democrats and their eventual nominee.

Less than a year after Bush resumed his push to offer the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, most of his would-be GOP successors could not have moved further from his platform. Even McCain now embraces policies to clamp down on employers and to seal the border with fencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and beefed-up border patrols. Only when the border is certified as closed would he then consider what to do with the illegal immigrants already in the country.

Huckabee's "Secure America" plan twins a similar crackdown with a proposal to give all illegal immigrants 120 days to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to leave the country. Those who register would face no penalty if they later applied to immigrate or visit. Those who do not "will be, when caught, barred from future reentry" for a decade, Huckabee's plan states.

Huckabee proved so mindful of the issue that he used last week's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto to argue for stronger border controls, "to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."

Romney would cut federal funds to any city that refuses to comply with federal immigration laws or to cooperate with a crackdown. Giuliani would issue all noncitizen workers and students a single, tamper-proof biometric identity card and create a single database to track all noncitizens in the country.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who joined the presidential campaign solely to pursue his hard-line agenda on illegal immigration, was so comfortable with the direction that his fellow GOP candidates were taking that he dropped out of the race last month and pronounced the field "Tancredo-ized."

Since Bush's first-term push for immigration reform, the political environment has changed dramatically, in large part because the geography of immigration has changed. It is no longer solely a border-state concern. States such as Iowa and New Hampshire have recently experienced their first real influxes of immigrant communities in decades.

"This is the most volatile issue I have measured since busing in 1972," said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster. "It's not like abortion or gay rights, which may touch some people or offend the moral values of some. This is something that affects everyone."

Hart compared the issue of immigration to the treaty returning to Panama the Panama Canal, which drew a visceral response in conservative circles and turned President Gerald R. Ford's GOP nomination campaign in 1976 from a cakewalk to a dogfight.

"It's been like boiling water," said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman and a co-chairman of Romney's campaign in the state. "It's an issue that was in the back of Americans' minds that needed to get fixed. It wasn't a priority until numbers got out of hand. Then Congress took it up, put it on the front burner, and when nothing got done, the voters turned exasperated. Can we live with such a significant breaking of the rule of law and not be morally outraged?"

Latino and other minority groups see racial codes in many of the words the Republican candidates have used -- for instance, "illegals" rather than "illegal immigrants." And hovering around the campaigns are far more strident figures and organizations. Immigration groups were taken aback when Huckabee accepted the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the border-security Minuteman Project, calling it "providential."

Mothers Against Illegal Aliens recently posted a plea for people to bring their own sheets and utensils to hotels and restaurants because "the person who cooked your meal or made your bed may very well be the one who picked your fruit and vegetables," suggesting that immigrants are spreading disease.

"We as a community are under attack," Mu¿oz said.

Its members have pledged to fight back. A coordinated campaign, by Latino political groups, service unions, Spanish-language television and radio stations and print-media outlets helped entice more than 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship through October, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. The campaign is now shifting to voter registration and education.

"I think many folks underestimate how sophisticated immigrants and immigrant voters are," Vargas said. "People are seeing participation in the political arena as an act of self-defense."

Officials in most of the Republican campaigns say they are not worried. Their candidates have distinguished between their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for legal immigration. And all voters share concerns about security and the rule of law, said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the Giuliani campaign.

But other Republicans are not as sanguine. Mehlman warned that without a concerted effort to woo back the Latino voters the campaigns have turned off, the GOP may be in trouble. "Is there a basic concern?" he asked. "The answer is 'yes.' "

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