Further clouding Obama’s message is the fact that more immigrants were deported during his first year in office — more than 388,000 — than any other year in the republic’s history. To progressives, the president’s apparent “security first” approach makes it seem as though he’s trying to appease conservatives at the expense of Latinos.

The big elephant in the room, one that Democrats and the media willfully ignore, is race. Not the race of immigrants — the race of the president.

As the son of an immigrant and as a black man, Obama walks a sticky briar patch in handling reform. His management of his brand identity, especially his blackness, creates an aura of historic inclusion and racial reconciliation, even while it discourages too much diversity talk or racial grist. According to this stratagem, the president is a racial prophet with no racial agenda. Race does not play a role in Obama’s national problem solving, but it is central to his novelty and political brand. His image deftly depends on a racial identity even as it downplays it.

This political and racial double bind handicaps Obama’s aptitude for immigration reform. Any race-related issue, especially immigration reform, that isn’t properly and universally feel-good, is radioactive for this president.

Political challenges lurk for all involved. Obama and a slim-majority Democratic Congress need to balance the substance of immigration reform with the competing demands of labor groups, Latinos, clergy, civil liberty advocates and others.

Little wonder that Democrats who represent majority-white and/or blue-collar districts, which have been hit especially hard by the recession, are bucking reform.

Rep. Zack Space, D-Ohio, who represents a Republican-leaning district that is more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white, recently issued a press release, “Plan to Move Forward With Immigration Reform Is Absolutely Wrong for Ohio,” denouncing an agreement between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform this year.

“We need to be focusing on the economy, period,” said Space. “I am firmly opposed to these plans, and I will fight Speaker Pelosi’s attempts to move this disastrous policy.”

As if predicting the 2010 storm over immigration reform, Obama’s own chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, declared back in 2006: “For the American people, and therefore, all of us, immigration emerged as the third rail of American politics. And anyone who doesn’t realize that isn’t with the American people.” True to racial codes, Emanuel’s “American people” apparently excludes the majority of Latinos.

While orchestrating the Democratic takeover of the House in ’06, Emanuel advised the party’s candidates to inoculate themselves against the vexatious issue by tacking to the right. With a few exceptions — illustrated by Sen. Charles Schumer and Reid’s reform agendas — Emanuel’s advice still reigns as the Democratic conventional wisdom.

Frank Sharry, a longtime pro-immigrant activist and the founder of America’s Voice, a nonprofit devoted to building support for immigration reform, mocked the Democrats’ squeamishness.

“We always get the ‘smart’ pundits who say Democrats would be foolhardy to bring up immigration: ‘You’ll drive independents away and mobilize the right wing,’” Sharry told the Daily Beast. “First of all, the right is already totally mobilized. Second, independents want solutions and not politics as usual. And third — guess what? — Latinos were a base vote in 2006 and 2008, and they’re about to stay home because you haven’t done shit for them.”

In the meantime, Republicans also need to balance substance with the political demands of tugging factions: their pro-business, pro-immigration corporate wing versus the vocal immigration-restriction movement.

And then, of course, there are Latinos. The 2010 census will likely shift power and add congressional seats to Republican-leaning states and to states with significant or fast-growing Latino populations, like Texas and Arizona.

Given Latinos’ increasing clout at the polls, each party faces short- and long-term political gains and hazards no matter what it does.

A patch of tar babies — pragmatism, centrism, geography and race — color the willingness of Obama and his fellow Democrats to undertake immigration reform. As the president juggles his record-high levels of immigrant deportation, his ambivalence over the issue, and his delicate racial karma, Democrats should not allow this political and racial calculus to foil reform.

Rich Benjamin is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America,” winner of a 2009 Editor’s Choice award from Booklist and the American Library Association.

As members of Congress discussed healthcare reform with their constituents over the recent recess, many faced repeated, heated charges that the reform would stick “American taxpayers” — as if undocumented workers don’t pay consumption taxes! — with the healthcare bills of illegal immigrants. If the swine flu weren’t enough to stigmatize Latino immigrants, now there’s the healthcare debate.

How did racism and xenophobia become so deeply enmeshed in this debate?

Decades in the running, a right-wing drumbeat continues telling Americans that “government is on your back,” that “you should keep your own money,” and “let the market take care of it.” This political outlook feeds resentments over race, including anger about “high taxes” for public services that are allegedly wasted on urban blacks and illegal aliens. This stubborn, pervasive mind-set fuels the myths that many Republicans and business interests bandy to explain America’s economic woes: “too much government,” “overregulation,” “wasteful spending” and “welfare abuse.”

Race — that is, 30 years of government-supported desegregation and the sharp increase of brown immigration — is not incidental to the public’s cynicism, disconnection and unwillingness to support the public sector, meaning the goods, services and places that belong to “we the people.” That’s especially true when we talk about healthcare.

Eduardo Porter, a financial journalist and editorial board member of the New York Times, has documented how “racial and ethnic diversity undermine support for public investment in social welfare. For all the appeal of America’s melting pot, the country’s diverse ethnic mix is one main reason for entrenched opposition to public spending on the public good.”

Moreover, two Harvard economists have correlated diversity with public spending in Western Europe and the United States. The economists demonstrated that half the social-spending gap between the two areas was due to the United States’ more varied racial and ethnic mix. (The other half was due largely to the stronger left-wing parties in Western Europe.)

Once upon a time in Wilson’s native South Carolina, the 1950s through the 1970s, whites fled public spaces en masse — pools, parks, schools, cafeterias — rather than share those public resources with blacks. This is déjà vu all over again: Latino immigrants are the new blacks. A truculent white minority wants to re-segregate their communities; more, it bashes the publish sphere and aims to sabotage public spending on the common good, including the president’s healthcare plans.

Put bluntly, it is not a coincidence that America’s love affair with all-things private — gated communities, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds, private hospitals — heated up during the 1950s as the federal government sought to integrate the nation.

As the U.S. government began helping everyday Americans at unprecedented levels from FDR’s New Deal on, immigration has become all the more contentious. Immigration broils as an issue precisely as this nation faces budget deficits and potential cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the state university systems and so on. Those institutions and services were in their infancy — or did not even exist — during the first great wave of immigration, from the 1880s to the 1910s, which brought the Irish and eastern and southern Europeans to our shores.

“Between the start of the Great Depression and the end of the civil rights era, government at all levels assumed new responsibilities to limit the misery suffered by the poor and the sick,” observes Roberto Suro in his brilliant work, “Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America.” “Immigration was so low during that entire period that there was no need to discuss the role of the newly arrived. Then Latino immigration began to produce a large number of new claimants on the public sector.” As the president and America debate a large, necessary overhaul of the public sector, expect more xenophobic outbursts like Wilson’s.

Tea baggers rail against social programs that are allegedly squandered on “illegal aliens.” The Birther movement rails against a supposedly Muslim president. Healthcare reform town halls combust over “government dependence.” Republicans like Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., push a boycott of the 2010 Census, fretting that immigrants and minorities will be overcounted.

A Census Bureau prediction that makes headlines across the nation is fast becoming a reality: By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority. This demographic projection sounds a frightening alarm to the likes of Bachmann and Joe Wilson. It heralds significant change to our nation’s culture, electoral politics and distribution of resources.

We must understand Wilson’s outburst by exposing its past and future context — including what I call “The White People Deadline,” 2042. And then we must move the healthcare debate forward.