As politicians across the spectrum compete with each other over the commitment to do something about immigration, the pro-immigrant rights movement finds itself split over how to deal with America's untouchables: undocumented immigrants. PNS associate editor David Bacon reports on the division. Bacon writes about immigration and labor issues for a wide range of publications.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Confronting the most serious anti-immigrant backlash in decades, immigrant rights advocates have split over a crucial issue -- whether to defend all newcomers or just those who have legal documents entitling them to live and/or work in the United States.

The split isn't simply over strategy. As immigrant rights emerge as a dominant issue of the civil rights movement of the 1990s, advocates who favor an inclusive approach worry that the split could prove as damaging to the movement as anything the anti-immigrant forces propose.

The split mirrors an ongoing tension in civil rights politics -- between those front line activists immersed in the survival struggles of people on the ground, and those who tackle the politics of shaping policy at the national level. It came to a head late last year as a new omnibus immigration bill began wending its way through Congress: community-based activists wanted to confront the bill head on -- particularly its most repressive proposals aimed at undocumented immigrants. National lobbyists, arguing that the crackdown on undocumented immigrants was essentially unstoppable, wanted to focus the movement's energies on preserving the status and rights of legal immigrants.

"The American people want the federal government to take decisive and effective action to control illegal immigration," the National Immigration Forum -- which historically has coordinated lobbying in defense of immigrants -- told legislators. "It's the right goal. But legal immigration is not the same thing as illegal immigration."

Immigrant rights groups have produced voluminous evidence that both legal and illegal immigration is good for the country. Nevertheless, provisions against legal immigration were stripped out of the bill while measures against undocumented immigrants were passed, including a provision barring undocumented children from public schools. "It was a strategic compromise -- the only way to keep a bad bill from being worse," confided one veteran observer.

The compromise position was that taken by Democratic Party leaders. President Clinton, in his State of the Union speech in January, declared that "we are still a nation of immigrants" and called on the country to "go forward as one America, one nation working together." Then he proposed increasing border enforcement and stiffening sanctions against employing undocumented workers, and signed an order barring businesses which do so from receiving federal contracts.

For community activists, the distinction is tantamount to throwing undocumented immigrants to the wolves. "My biggest fear is that immigrant advocates have agreed to sacrifice one group of immigrants for the sake of another," argues Emily Goldfarb of the Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in San Francisco. "We're not only dividing immigrants between legal and illegal, but along racial and national lines. Asian immigrants, perceived as being by and large legal, are being pitted against Latinos, who are perceived as making up the majority of the undocumented. At a time when we need to build coalitions across these lines, this strategy drives in the wedge."

But Goldfarb also opposes making the distinction because it buys into a false premise that immigration in an era of global economics can be stopped if the measures you adopt are draconian enough. In reality, she and other advocates argue, as borders worldwide give way to the pressures of the global economy, the global economy impoverishes and uproots millions of people worldwide.

"With over 100 million people around the world living in countries other than those they were born in, it's a dangerous illusion to think we can remove and isolate ourselves from this global phenomenon," she says.

"You have to tell the truth, even if it's not politically popular or runs against racist stereotypes," agrees Susan Alva, an attorney for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. "When you don't, you lay the basis for further attacks against all immigrants and people of color, for the sake of tactical considerations which are really illusions."

Indeed, community activists blame the movement's failure to hold common ground on the rights of undocumented for the upsurge in anti-immigrant violence -- including the recent videotaped beating of two immigrants by sheriff's deputies in Riverside, Ca. "Once you say that illegal immigration is a problem, and only struggle over the means of solving it, you feed this hysteria," Alva says. "We saw the same pattern coming out of the compromises made to combat Proposition 187 (the California initiative to ban public services for undocumented immigrants). Although its target was undocumented immigrants, it has transformed life for Latinos of every status -- including those born here and many whose ancestors had lived in the U.S. for generations."

Meanwhile, as politicians across the spectrum compete with each other over their commitment to "do something about immigration," undocumented immigrants have become an untouchable issue even for one-time allies. And pro-immigrant rights advocates on the ground fear that by caving in to the idea that one group of immigrants are expendable, the repression against all immigrants will only intensify.