“This is a scapegoat issue to pick on immigrants,” says Fong, who wears a black collar and a large silver crucifix around his neck. His own father was arrested and detained in 1919 and held on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay for a year and a half. “From my community in Chinatown, I see this as a good unifying issue.”

In the House, a bill calls for building a 700-mile-long security fence along the border with Mexico and making it a felony to be in the country illegally. A less draconian Senate bill, which stalled at the end of last week, would have allowed undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for more than five years to stay and become citizens. Those in this country for less than two years would have to go home and seek reentry with others trying to immigrate, which could fracture families and communities. While the controversial bills have put Latinos who’ve crossed the border from the south in the spotlight, their issues affect people from numerous immigrant groups, including Chinese and Palestinians, who also turned out for the San Francisco rally.

Renee Saucedo, a staff attorney at the San Francisco Day Labor Program and for the nonprofit La Raza Centro Legal, sees many of her clients in the crowd, undocumented workers who do construction, hauling, gardening, housecleaning and childcare in San Francisco. “The proposals coming out of Congress today are the most egregious we have seen in this country’s history,” she says. “They are a complete violation of people’s human rights.” She argues that U.S. companies like Wal-Mart pay as little as $4 a day to waitresses working at their VIPS restaurants in Mexico; no wonder people come to the United States looking for a better-paying job.

Waving American flags in front of a huge painted banner that reads “Fast 4 Immigrant Human Rights” is a largely Latino crowd, including young mothers pushing strollers, a grandmother wearing a crocheted American flag pin, high school students and dozens of advocates for immigrants. It’s a press conference organized by the Deporten a la Migra Coalition — Immigrants Fighting for Their Rights — a coalition of groups advocating for undocumented immigrants.

Passing cars honk, drawing screams and cheers from the crowd, and a frenzy of flag waving — mostly American flags, with a few Mexican or Salvadoran flags to round out the pageant. Bonnie Senteno of San Francisco came to the rally with her 11-year-old son, Jack, “to support our brothers and sisters from the south. This place is theirs. Without the indigenous people of this region, we wouldn’t have a lot of what we have in this country.” As the crowd chants, “Sí se puede!” “Yes, we can!” she explains to Jack that it was Cesar Chavez’s rallying cry. “You know who he is, right?” Jack nods.

“El que no brinca es migra!” chants the crowd, as young women and kids hop up and down, laughing and smiling. (“If you don’t jump, you’re INS!”) A red, white, and blue sign declares “The war on terror is a war on immigrants,” with stars decorating the inside of the word “immigrants.” Another sign with red lettering on white poster board reads simply: “No human being should be call[ed] illegal.” Chants of “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” — “The people united will never be defeated” — and “A qui, estamos y no nos vamos” — “We’re here. We’re not going anywhere” — fill the air.

Chris Crass, 32, holds up one end of a large sign reading “European descendents for immigrant justice! Gringas para la justicia inmigrante.” He’s part of a group called the Heads Up Collective, a member of the Deporten a la Migra Coalition, which he translates as the Deport the INS Coalition. “White communities have to understand how so many of us have been pitted against immigrants of color, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to bosses using the bracero program to undercut unions,” he says. When a counter-protester in a backward baseball cap and black sunglasses, carrying a sign that reads “Stop the invasion” on one side and “Illegal = criminal” on other, captures a TV crew’s attention, Crass and his groups step in front of him to get their supportive message on camera.

The counter-protester, who does not give his name, is met by jeers from the crowd. “One counter-protester!” “That’s why we’re stronger than him.” “I have nothing against immigrants,” sasses back the counter-protester. “Legal immigrants!”

Sonja Ricket from Belgium, who’s lived in the United States for 15 years on temporary work visas, says she’s marching because she was exiled for three months by the Department of Homeland Security after living on an expired visa for six months while seeking a green card. She stayed in youth hostels in Belgium, while maintaining her apartment and office in San Francisco. Waiting for a new work visa put her $12,000 in debt. Now, back in the country on a two-year work visa that expires in January 2007, she says, “I want everyone to have a path to citizenship, including me, and I want there to be a just way for people to work without being sent home every three years.” As a self-employed movement therapist and a dance educator who teaches tango, it’s been tough for her to get a green card. “In the climate after 9/11, it’s practically impossible,” she says. Still, she knows that she’s lucky, compared to the low-income women, without papers, who come to the free movement clinic that she leads at a local women’s community center. “I know I’m privileged,” she says.

With a translator echoing his words in Spanish, Jay Jasper Pugao, 30, a teacher at East Oakland Community High School, shouts into a megaphone: “This issue affects all people, documented and undocumented.” Pugao recently took part in a seven-day hunger strike in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco to protest the immigration legislation. From under his brown baseball cap, which reads Fili Islander, he yells, “Our students, our elderly who came and built this country, are not criminals,” drawing hoots, claps and cheers. “This bill has the potential to sexually exploit our women!”

Pugao, who notes that he was educated in Oakland public schools, says he doesn’t remember any history lessons about Native Americans greeting the European immigrants by asking, “Hey, where are your documents, pilgrim?” The crowd chants, “The people united will never be defeated,” in three languages: English, Spanish and Tagalog. Meanwhile, Pugao explains to reporters that his parents came to this country with $200 and three children under the age of 10. His mother had a work visa at the time, but his father had only a tourist visa, which soon expired. It took his father, who once worked as a farm worker picking asparagus and who’s now a police technician for the city of Oakland, 15 years to become a citizen. Pugao, who became an American citizen as a child with his parents, says he went on a hunger strike to speak out in support of his family and the undocumented Filipino and Latino youth he works with as a teacher.

As Bishara Constandi from the Palestinian Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride starts to address the crowd, he asks them to “put down the U.S. flag.” “We are not here to beg for citizenship,” he says. “We are here to demand citizenship. Who built this country? Immigrants!” Many if not most of the flag wavers ignore his exhortation to put down the Stars and Stripes. One older man holds his up even higher, waving it even more fervently.

Saucedo, the day-labor program attorney, says the massive demonstrations in Dallas, Atlanta, L.A. and other cities across the country over the past few weeks show that “immigrant communities in this country are organizing and are politically much more powerful than people expected them to be. We are not powerless like people in power want us to be.”

She goes on to say that the massive, peaceful protests across the nation enabled millions who can’t vote to engage politically, whether they were the undocumented themselves or their children who may be American citizens but who feel they must speak out for parents and relatives. “Why do you think that so many people here are kids?” she asks. “They represent the parents and the grandparents. An attack on their families is an attack on them.”

Today is a huge day for the movement, Saucedo says, but she’s also looking forward to May 1, a “day without immigrants,” with participants encouraged not to go to work, school or shop. “Restaurants could literally stop. Hotels could literally stop.”

There’s no English class today for Maggie Terry’s students. An English-language teacher at John O’Connell High School of Technology in San Francisco, Terry brought 15 of her students to the Mission District. Teens who hail originally from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua crowd under an umbrella to get out of the rain. Terry says the class has been discussing the immigration bills in Congress and how they might affect their families.

Martin Olivares, 16, a skinny kid with a Mohawk who came to the United States four years ago from Mexico, says he’s here today with his class because “I want to shout my voice.” Olivares has a succinct explanation for why there’s so much debate in Congress and the White House about immigrants like him: “They are doing this because the bad government wants to look like a good government.”

Some people (communists) have noted that the timing of this big voter roll purge is a bit suspect and that it’s also weird that the vast majority of people on the list are Hispanics who are registered Democrats or independents. But as hero-senator Marco Rubio said recently of voter ID laws, “What’s the big deal?” Hundreds of the 1,638 people flagged as ineligible in Miami-Dade County have already offered proof of citizenship, so the system works. Let’s assume the 1,200 people who haven’t responded to the letter are all definitely not qualified.

(If I were an illegal immigrant, do you know what I would definitely not ever try to do? Vote! When you’re evading detection by the government, registering to vote and then casting a ballot — and in the process committing a felony — seems like asking for trouble.)

As must always be pointed out when writing about these sorts of things, there is no voter fraud epidemic. At all. Where there is genuinely illegal voting, it tends to be accidental or so small-scale as to present no challenge to the legitimacy of an election. The liberal position on election security is something like, “Better to let a couple of isolated instances of fraudulent or improper voting happen than to preemptively disenfranchise hundreds or even thousands of perfectly legal voters.” The conservative position tends to be, “We mustn’t let the Mexicans steal the election for the nanny state socialists ACORN ACORN BILL AYERS ACORN.”

Here’s the Tampa Bay Times with more on Florida’s war on (certain people) voting:

This is part of a pattern. Republicans actively gin up voter fraud claims to justify turning voting into an obstacle course to dissuade Democratic-leaning constituencies. It’s what happened in Florida last year when the Legislature used voter fraud as an excuse to cut early voting days and make it harder for renters and college students to vote a regular ballot. The most disgraceful part of the law imposes steep penalties and fines on groups conducting voter registration drives that fail to meet burdensome bureaucratic rules and turn forms in within 48 hours, causing the League of Women Voters to cancel its drive.

But if we let renters vote, why would anyone buy a house? Then how would we save the economy?

Don’t worry, though, it will still be very easy for… certain other kinds of people to cast votes:

Meanwhile, there was no attempt by the Florida Legislature to tighten rules for absentee voting, which is probably the easiest way to produce a fraudulent ballot since there is no way of knowing who fills it out. Maybe this lack of interest stemmed from the fact that absentee voters tend to lean Republican, while early voters typically lean Democrat.

Well. Now that I know how easy it is to absentee vote in Florida, I am off to commit some voter fraud with my illegal immigrant friends. Next stop, Sharia!

But a closer look at the numbers is not so reassuring for the president. Much of the growth in the Latino population has occurred in California, Texas, Illinois and New York, which are not likely to be competitive come Election Day. While the Latino population is growing fast, the Latino electorate is not. Compared to other ethnic/racial groups, Latinos are more likely than whites to be under 18 years of age or to be non-citizens. “For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens,” notes William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote.”

Frey has argued that “minorities will decide” the 2012 election, but he acknowledged in a telephone interview that Latinos, as a group, do not loom large in most of the dozen battleground states. According to his analysis of 2008 and 2012 census data, Latinos comprise less than 2 percent of the voting population in Ohio and Virginia. In North Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa, they comprise 3 percent or less of the electorate. In Wisconsin, they comprise 3.1 percent of voters, down from 3.7 percent in 2008.  Even if Obama won an additional 10 percent of the Latino electorate in these states over what he did against McCain, the increase would be smaller than his margin of victory in 2008 in every case.

That leaves Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where the Latino vote appears to be large enough to be decisive in a close race. The good news for Obama is that many of those states could make the difference between winning and losing the White House. The bad news is that the outlook is distinctly less favorable to a more decisive Latino role than 2008.

As Frey has noted:

Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.

None of those factors appear to hold true in Florida. Latinos comprise about 15 percent of the state’s voters, unchanged from 2008. While a Gallup swing state poll earlier this month found Democrats are more enthusiastic about the president than Republicans are about Romney, they are also less enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy now than they were in 2008, especially minority voters. As Real Clear Politics  has noted:

Enthusiasm among non-white voters is down from 74 percent at this point in 2008 (vs. 58 percent for whites) to 48 percent today (the same goes for whites). And, indeed, in 2010, African-American turnout reverted to the mean. If this occurs in 2012, Democrats will need a massive surge in the minority population elsewhere to make up for this regression.

The most likely place for this to occur is within the Latino community. That population grew smartly over the 2000s. But — much less remarked upon — the Latino electorate did not. Indeed, since 2004, it has been almost perfectly flat, and it contributed only marginally to the decline of the white vote from 2004 to 2008.

Only in the three swing states of the Southwest — New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado — does the Latino vote seem big enough to be decisive. In New Mexico, Latinos are 38 percent of the electorate, down slightly from 2008. In Nevada, Latinos are now 17.3 percent of all voters, up from 13.3 percent from four years ago. And in Colorado, Latinos are now 12.1 percent of all voters, up from 11.3 percent in 2008.  Only in these states does the combination of the size and growth of the Latino electorate and Obama’s edge on Romney appear capable of giving him a margin of victory he might otherwise lack. In the rest of the swing states, he’s going to need something else.

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.” The liberal research group American Bridge captured the comments:

Lately, however, King has backed off his inflammatory rhetoric, thanks to a tough challenge from Democrat Christie Vilsack. His bird dog comments suggest, however, that his mouth will continue to dog him.

Update: In a statement, Vilsack’s campaign said, “If we’re going to have a real discussion on immigration, we should start by acknowledging that immigrants are human beings. Iowans are taught in their community, in their church, and at the dinner table to respect each other, not to compare people to dogs. People expect a serious discussion between candidates and that’s what we’re committed to.”

The Romney campaign’s response has been that immigration is irrelevant to winning over Latino voters — jobs and the economy are the only things that matter. But his speech this week underscores just how difficult an argument that will be for him to make: In the past, the Latino Coalition has argued that immigration reform is part of a pro-business platform, not separate from it.

These days, the only immigration issue the Coalition mentions on its website is the “Mexican Trucking issue.” But the group aggressively advocated for comprehensive immigration reform under President Bush. In 2007, the Coalition’s president slammed “far right extremists” who opposed “common-sense [immigration reform] legislation that is so important for the security and economic vitality of our country.” The group “urge[d] Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democratic leadership in the House to demonstrate courage and leadership on this issue and take on immigration reform,” saying Pelosi could pass a bill “without the level of Republican support she is demanding.”

In the 2008 GOP primary, the Latino Coalition favored Rudy Giuliani — a veritable leftist on immigration reform compared to most Republicans — with the former New York mayor capturing 64 percent of the vote in a straw poll of the group’s members. Romney apparently finished behind Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Fred Thompson, as his name was not mentioned in the statement.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce, whose grand D.C. offices will host the event Wednesday, also supported comprehensive reform under Bush, similarly seeing it as a boon for free market capitalism. The powerful business lobby still calls for “an effective and streamlined temporary worker program so that employers can hire immigrant workers” and “a pathway to legal status for undocumented workers currently in the United States.”

This was essentially Bush’s policy too. But Romney’s infamous immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who authored the draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said his candidate would not support any kind of pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants.

The Romney campaign briefly attempted to disown Kobach after Romney won the primary and the advisor’s utility was spent, but he may have to throw his entire immigration policy under the bus with Kobach if he hopes to win over the Latino business owners on Wednesday, let alone Hispanic voters more generally.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina.  ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez  said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”