WASHINGTON (By Dave Montgomery, McClatchy) August 20, 2007 — Seven weeks after the collapse of legislation in Congress, the outcry against immigration is louder than ever.

It is manifested by proposed clampdowns at the state and local level and an uproar over the arrest of an undocumented immigrant in the execution-style slayings of three New Jersey college students.

Scores of organizations, ranging from mainstream to fringe groups, are marshalling forces in what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, calls “a war here at home” against immigration, which he says is as important as America’s conflicts being fought overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The intense rhetoric is generating fears of an emerging dark side, evident in growing discrimination against Hispanics and a surge of xenophobia unseen since the last big wave of immigration in the early 20th century.

“I don’t think there’s been a time like this in our lifetime,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Even though immigration is always unsettling and somewhat controversial, we haven’t had this kind of intensity and widespread, deep-seated anger for almost 100 years.”

The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, said the number of “nativist extremist” organizations advocating against immigration has grown from virtually zero just over five years ago to 144, including nine classified as hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan supremacists.

Some senators who participated in the midsummer debate over President Bush’s failed immigration bill said they were barraged with venomous mail.

Eighty-three percent of immigrants from Mexico and 79 percent of immigrants from Central America think there is growing discrimination against Latin American immigrants in the United States, according to a poll conducted by Miami-based Bendixen & Associates.

Instead of taking a downturn after the collapse of Bush’s immigration overhaul in June, the debate over immigration has continued and seemingly escalated. As prospects for congressional action appeared increasingly in doubt this year, all 50 states and more than 75 towns and cities considered — and in many cases enacted — immigration restrictions, even though initial court rulings have declared such actions unconstitutional intrusions on federal responsibilities.

Two counties in the populous northern Virginia suburbs of Washington are among the latest to consider restrictions on immigration. Nationwide, many of the proposed ordinances strike a similar theme, penalizing employers who hire migrants, barring undocumented immigrants from certain municipal services, or prohibiting landlords from renting to migrants.

The murders of three college students in Newark — and the wounding of a fourth — reignited calls for a clampdown on immigration after disclosures that one of the suspects, Jose Lachira Carranza, was an undocumented immigrant from Peru who was out on bail awaiting trial on assault and child rape charges.

Authorities arrested two more suspects on Saturday, bringing the total number of arrests in the case to five.

The case revitalized an argument made in the congressional debate that the flow of migrants, although predominated by job-seekers lured by the prospect of higher wages and better conditions, includes a menacing criminal element.

A coalition of 15 anti-immigration groups denounced Newark’s and New Jersey’s governments of “negligent complicity” in the deaths through inadequate law enforcement. The protest was organized by Dallas lawyer David Marlett, who founded ProAmerica Cos., composed of more than 400 companies that refuse to knowingly hire migrants.

The Bush administration, in the absence of the sweeping immigration overhaul sought by the president, moved earlier this month to toughen enforcement of existing laws, threatening steeper penalties against employers and more vigorous worksite inspections. Pro-immigrant groups fear that the new rules could result in wholesale firings as over-reactive employers seek to avoid possible violations.

Demographers and immigration experts say the passions over immigration in the opening decade of the 21st century are comparable to those that swept through American cities with the surge of immigrants who descended on U.S. shores from the 2000s to the 2020s.

The latest wave of immigrants — both legal and undocumented — is predominated by Mexicans and other Latin Americans who are venturing deep into the U.S. interior to follow the job market, often settling in towns and cities that, just a few years earlier, were unaccustomed to Hispanics.

The growing presence has resulted in a proliferation of predominately conservative advocacy groups, many of whom weighed into the congressional debate to demand the government halt the flow of undocumented aliens.

Many, bowing to America’s legacy as a land of immigrants, stress that they support legal immigration — though possibly in reduced numbers — but view migrants as lawbreakers who take jobs that should go to U.S. citizens.

But John Trasvina, president of the Los Angeles-based Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said that the backlash over migrants is clearly generating widening anti-Hispanic sentiments, often exemplified in hate rhetoric on talk shows and over the Internet.