Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They’ve supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers. “I’m instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last month. “But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration … [W]hile immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico.”

Minshall says he sees the pain every day. Baltimore, he says, is full of young, black men who are “unemployable because they won’t work for $4.50 an hour.” The influx of immigrants, he says, “is tilting everyone’s wages down, except for the upper class.” He says that one member of his church, the owner of a roofing business, recently fired his entire crew and replaced them with immigrant contractors. The man felt “pushed up against a wall,” Minshall says, because he couldn’t compete without using illegal labor. “The customer will always buy the $2,000 roof and not the $2,500 one,” Minshall says, adding, “We’ve gotten so addicted to cheap goods.”

As people like Minshall illustrate, the liberal debate over immigration isn’t simply one between the left and the center. It cuts across ideologies. There are conservative Democrats, civil rights activists and leftist multiculturalists calling for legalizing undocumented immigrant workers, while figures including antiwar Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, writer Michael Lind and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., are urging much tougher restrictions. The central question is whether the interests of working-class Americans and those of immigrants, legal and illegal, are necessarily in opposition, and if they are, how progressives — and the lawmakers they support — should deal with it. What does it mean if the inspiring words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty — “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me” — can’t be reconciled with the needs of this country’s workers?

There are two bills at the center of the debate, though it goes far beyond them. The recent pro-immigration protests were galvanized by a stringent measure recently passed by the House that would criminalize illegal immigrants and those who help them. Many of those at the demonstrations supported a competing Senate bill put forward by Ted Kennedy and John McCain. That bill would create 400,000 temporary visas for low-skilled foreign workers, and would allow illegal immigrants who have been in the country for over five years to gain legal residency and start a path to citizenship after paying fines and undergoing background checks. A Senate compromise on the bill collapsed last week after Republicans failed to toughen it enough to make it palatable to some reluctant conservatives, and it’s not clear whether any immigration reform legislation is going to pass. But the debate is almost certain to keep boiling, with another big day of nationwide pro-immigrant protests planned for May 1.

So far, the immigration protests have drawn support from both civil rights leaders and labor leaders. Some liberals, though, are urging progressives not to align themselves with a movement that could ultimately hurt Americans workers. Plans for a guest worker program are especially contentious because opponents argue that it would create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised labor.

In a March 29 column posted on the progressive Web site Common Dreams, Thom Hartmann described the fight between supporters of the Senate and House bills as one between “corporatist Republicans (‘amnesty!’)” and “racist Republicans (‘fence!’).” “Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages,” he wrote. “If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways. Between the Reagan years — when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce — and today, we’ve gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result — as Caesar [sic] Chávez predicted — of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it’s most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it’s hit all sectors of our economy.”

As Hartmann notes, Cesar Chávez, the legendary founder of the United Farmworkers Union, was at one point so opposed to illegal immigration that he was known to call the INS on the undocumented. “What he was trying to do was to stop growers from using immigrants to break the strikes,” says Nestor Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston.

There are, of course, many factors besides immigration leading to the long decline of labor unions. Globalization, the deindustrialization of the American economy and the antilabor policies of the GOP, at both the state and national level, have all played profound roles. But there is data to back up the claim that immigration drives down working-class wages. In a 2004 study, Harvard economist George J. Borjas wrote that by “increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent.” High school dropouts were more severely affected — their wages were reduced 7.4 percent, Borjas found. “The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary,” he wrote. “It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status.”

“What immigration really does is redistribute wealth away from workers toward employers,” Borjas told the Washington Post last month.

Borjas’ conclusions are not universally accepted; UC-Berkeley economist David Card challenged them in a 2005 paper titled “Is the New Immigration Really So Bad?” He declared that the wage gap between American dropouts and high school graduates has remained nearly constant since 1980, despite the rise of immigrants in the workplace. “Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant,” he wrote. A recent analysis in the New York Times, “Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye,” pointed out that the wages of high school dropouts in California, who face a lot of competition from illegal immigrants, fell 17 percent between 1980 and 2004. But the wages of high school dropouts in Ohio, where there are very few illegal immigrants, fell 31 percent during the same period.

Nor is it at all clear that illegal immigration is to blame for high African-American unemployment, as pastor Minshall supposes. “No academic has really been able to make the direct correlation,” says Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. African-American unemployment, she says, “obviously has something to do with a broader set of sociological and racism issues. It leads people to say if you didn’t have the immigrants here, legal or illegal, then those high unemployment rates among African-American males would come down. But that’s not been the case.”

Still, there is a general consensus among most experts that immigration has at least some negative effect on the wages of low-skilled American workers. “Nobody’s been able to really pin it down with hard data, except to the extent that there probably is a slight depressing of wages,” Meissner says. “We know from economic theory overall that if you have an unending supply of labor, you’re going to make it more difficult for the workers at the bottom to compete effectively.”

Conservatives, eager to deflect attention from their own schisms, are glorying in the dilemma that immigration economics seem to create for liberals. Writing in the National Review, Rich Lowry evinced a newfound reverence for the noble legacies of Chávez and “great labor leader” Samuel Gompers, both of whom supported restrictions on immigration. “Democrats opposed the ratification of the Central America Free Trade Agreement last year for fear that it would undercut American workers made to compete with cheap Latin American labor,” he wrote. “The problem the Democrats must have had with this effect on American workers was that it was too indirect. The party now favors importing lots of that same cheap Latin American labor directly into the United States.”

Why, then, did so many union officials support the April 10 marches? Both the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO were involved in organizing the demonstrations, and labor leaders spoke at several rallies. “This is a moment of historic decision for the United States of America,” AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the crowd in Washington. “Do we reaffirm our welcome to families fleeing poverty and oppression, who come here seeking a job, a home, a chance at a better life? Do we create a path to citizenship to all who have earned it with their hard work, to all who love and respect America? Or do we reject our heritage and put up signs that say, ‘The American Dream belongs only to the few?’”

Lowry sees the union support as a cynical attempt to recruit immigrants in order to make up for unions’ failure to organize American workers. But for some progressive analysts, there’s a more optimistic explanation, one rooted in the old ideal of solidarity.

One way for liberals to transcend the ideological impasse over immigration is to take on the larger problem of the upward distribution of wealth in America. As things stand now, American high school dropouts and illegal immigrants are essentially fighting over scraps at the bottom of the American pay barrel. But by cooperating in a reinvigorated labor movement, some progressives say, both Americans and immigrants can elevate the pay scale and receive a decent wage.

Nathan Newman, policy director at the Progressive Legislative Action Network, points out that right now, the poorest fifth of Americans earn a mere 3.5 percent of the national income. Rather than accepting the status quo and then fighting over their small shares, Newman argues, American and immigrant workers need to join together. Turning that 3.5 percent into 7 percent, he says, would have a far more salutary effect on wages than any crackdown on immigrants.

“The reason most workers, civil rights leaders, et cetera, are supporting the idea of immigrant rights is that they know the best way to keep [labor policies] the same is to allow conservatives and others to pit different groups of workers against each other,” Newman says. As he sees it, support for the immigration movement isn’t a betrayal of America’s working class; rather, it’s the key to a class-based political realignment. The movement that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets this month has “the makings of new political alliances that are far more stable and far more likely to create broader social change,” he says. “Which is again why you see many black civil rights leaders supporting these marches. This is the alliance they want. They think it’s an alliance that can deal with these much broader issues.”

The broader issues are about economic justice in a country where the gulf between rich and poor seems to widen by the day. “If people are worried about wage standards in the U.S., let’s deal with that,” Newman says. “Let’s really deal with the issue of what’s happening with the enforcement of our labor laws, with the complete collapse of the minimum-wage rate. Those are far more significant issues for most workers than the ones everyone is wringing their hands over.”

Some union leaders argue that legalizing undocumented immigrants — and thus giving them the same rights as other workers — will stop employers from using them to undermine organizing drives. “It is bad for American workers to have any worker in this country without any rights and subject to exploitation,” says Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the SEIU, the country’s fastest-growing union. “Immigrants are going to continue coming. The question all of us should ask ourselves is under what condition should they come. Most people would say better they come with full rights and protection so they’re not exploited and used by employers against American workers.”

Immigrant workers, after all, aren’t just working in the underground economy — many of them are on the books, working in industries that unions hope to organize. “In about 50 to 60 percent of the employment circumstances, employers are actually reporting those workers and paying into the Social Security system,” Meissner says. “A very large share of these workers are either using somebody else’s Social Security number, or they’re using fake Social Security numbers.” Some even use 000-00-0000, which, she says, the system accepts. Despite the perception of illegal immigrants as an absolute drain on public resources, Meissner points out that hundreds of billions of dollars have been paid into Social Security from untraceable accounts, indirectly supporting American workers.

Agriculture used to be the main industry employing illegal immigrants, but that’s no longer the case. Now, Meissner says, the dominant fields in which they work are construction, landscaping, healthcare, elderly care, hospitality and restaurants. Because there are so many illegal immigrants in the service economy, union leaders say that securing their rights is key to organizing that growing sector. These are not, by and large, jobs that can be outsourced, so if employers are forced to stop underpaying service workers living in America, they’ll have to raise wages.

Currently, somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of SEIU’s 1.8 million members are immigrants, Medina says. He doesn’t know how many are illegal, but says, “I think it’s fair to assume there are a lot of undocumented workers among that number.” Yet organizing undocumented immigrants presents specific challenges. Right now, illegal immigrants serve as a kind of safety valve for employers who want to thwart union drives. Legally, employers can’t fire workers for trying to start a union — unless they’re undocumented. In the 2002 decision Hoffman Plastic Compounds Inc. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Labor Relations Board could not order back pay to an illegal immigrant who was let go for trying to organize his workplace, reasoning that the wages would have been illegally earned in the first place.

Thus threats to crack down on undocumented workers can dissuade organizers. “We see it every day,” says Medina. Sometimes it’s blatant — an employer will threaten to call the INS. “Other times, all of a sudden they’ll start questioning their [employees'] papers, their Social Security numbers and all of that. The message is pretty clear. This all of a sudden begins to happen during an organizing drive.”

If immigrants had access to work permits and a path to citizenship, Medina says, it would be harder to exploit them, and working conditions could be improved across the board. “Immigrants understand if they want to improve their lives, the labor movement is their best bet,” he says. “And if the labor movement wants to improve the lives of American workers, immigrants are the best bet for accomplishing that.” This is a vision that most progressive thinkers can embrace. Whether American workers will do so is another question entirely.

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.”