After being contained for nearly a decade, immigration reform has been breaking its tethers: a new wave of grassroots activists and a serious congressional faction is putting the issue back on the American political agenda. Fed up with the Bush administration’s disinterest in securing the country’s borders, local elected officials are also stepping into the breach. The Minuteman Project—which mobilized volunteers in a well-publicized effort to help patrol the Mexico-Arizona border earlier this year—now has affiliates in 18 states and has attracted favorable press coverage and public notice. In New Hampshire, a local police chief is trying to employ criminal-trespass statutes against illegal aliens. In Texas, a county commissioner is using federal anti-corruption statutes against employers who hire illegals.

In the early 1990s, when immigration was last on the national agenda, it was a hot grassroots issue only in California, home of Proposition 187. Now, with large numbers of illegal aliens visible throughout the country and post-9/11 security worries, local concern is widespread. The elite press—liberal and neoconservative alike—sneers at “beer swilling good ol’ boys” who want to monitor the border, but the fact is that the long simmering sentiment of Americans desirous of border enforcement and lower rates of immigration may be ready to take shape as an unstoppable bipartisan majority.

But note the cautious “may.” Recall that in the early 1990s, immigration reform seemed like an issue whose time had come. But first some bad luck interfered—California Gov. Pete Wilson’s illness at the outset of his 1996 presidential campaign and Barbara Jordan’s sudden death just as her Clinton-appointed commission’s report was completed. (The group chaired by the eloquent Democratic congresswoman had recommended more effective interior enforcement against illegal aliens and a reduction in legal immigration.) In the meantime, the opposition rallied: the cheap-labor business lobbies forged a viable coalition with leftwing multiculti forces. They mobilized against immigration reform and killed it: in early 1996, serious immigration-reform legislation came up some 40 votes short in Congress, and that was the end of it.

The United States is different now. There are more immigrants and children of immigrants of every stripe. However much estimates of the Hispanic vote are swollen by the Beltway pundits, that vote is larger than it used to be—and growing. There is much truth to Nathan Glazer’s assertion—first published seven years ago—that “We are All Multiculturalists Now.” The Euro-America that existed until roughly 1980 has passed into history. If the immigration-reform movement is not to squander its second (and likely its last) opportunity, it must learn to accommodate itself to those changes.

An obscure incident in Laguna Beach, California illuminates the movement’s most dangerous trap. In mid-July, a hundred protesters marched to decry city funding of a day-labor site for illegal workers. Among the participants were members of Save Our State, an immigration-reform group involved in the Proposition 187 campaign, and James Gilchrist, one of the principals of the Minuteman Project—both groups roughly representative of grassroots immigration reform. They waved American flags and carried posters calling for the deportation of illegal aliens. A dozen lefty counter-protesters challenged them, labeling the demonstrators racist nuts.

And then a half-dozen extremists—people who actually are racist nuts—made an appearance, unfurling Confederate battle flags and in one instance a Nazi swastika. It’s not clear what happened then, but any hope immigration reformers had of making a favorable impression on viewers of the local news immediately vanished.

The Minutemen make clear in their literature, public statements, and website that they want nothing to do with racists or white nationalists, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. But the Laguna Beach fiasco demonstrates that such policies don’t go far enough. It is the nature of politically marginal groups to seek to attach themselves to more broad-based social movements—and they won’t be deterred by polite requests that they stay away. The Left’s history is replete with various Communist groups trying to gain influence in the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and the antiwar movement. Indeed, the hard Left actually possessed cadres with considerable organizational skills that could make themselves useful in ways that the average skinhead with a swastika cannot.

In the early years of the Cold War, the American labor movement addressed the problem by purging Communists (including many skilled organizers) from its ranks. Such a purge no doubt went against the grain of many union types, but it was a necessary prelude to the golden age of the American labor movement in which tens of millions of workers and their families were able to acquire the trappings of a middle-class life.

There’s an old joke about the Republican Party and its dismal but perhaps slightly improving electoral relationship with black Americans. Question: what do you call the black man you run into at the Republican convention? Answer: Mr. Keynote Speaker. The joke bespeaks a cynicism about Republican minority-outreach policies that can easily be overstated. There is no more real racism in the GOP ranks than among white Democrats and roughly equivalent concerns about safety, school quality, and other topics that often have racial aspects to them. But—mirroring the Democrats—the GOP has adopted minority outreach big time, and it has largely overcome the image it had 15 or 20 years ago as a party built around white backlash and the Southern strategy. That image has faded —without, it might be noted, costing the GOP its hold on the South.

If the immigration-reform movement is to succeed, it needs to achieve something similar. If its foes can routinely and successfully depict immigration reform as racist and anti-immigrant, it will fail. The movement needs to create an aura around itself that is attractive to first- and second-generation immigrants, and—just as important—that would be repellant to the kind of white nationalists who want to attach themselves to it for their own purposes.

In theory this is simple enough: the most sensible immigration-reform line —most consistently embodied by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies—is pro-immigrant and pro-reform. In essence, the argument is that the United States could better welcome and assimilate new immigrants if their rate of entry were reduced.

Unlike many tactical political arguments, this one has the added benefit of being true. The greatest barrier to higher wages and more economic security for the millions of immigrants working in low-wage jobs is the great reserve army of future illegal aliens ready to work for even lower wages. The Bush administration and the neoconservatives insist, falsely, that these cannot be kept out.

The more poor immigrants there are, the more difficult for American schools to improve the skills of their children. The greatest barrier to real assimilation is the persistence of expanding communities in which English is a second language, barely spoken at all.

The only people whose interests would be harmed by a slowdown in immigration are not the immigrants already here—they would clearly benefit—but the ethnic activists who purport to speak for them and the employers who want a large, desperate pool of workers willing to toil for sub-American wage rates.

Many in the immigration-reform movement understand this, but it’s not clear they know it well enough. For example, Save Our State founder Joseph Turner recently sought to present his case to Los Angeles’s black community by soliciting an invitation to speak before Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s Urban Policy Roundtable, a popular political forum. Hearing of his scheduled talk, open-borders forces mobilized against the appearance, labeling Save our State violent, hateful, and racist. The smear was false, of course. But Hutchinson said he was troubled by rhetoric on the SOS website asking whether Californians wanted their state to turn into a “Third World cesspool.” He eventually rescinded the invitation.

A case could be made that such language isn’t racist, but it is not likely to be persuasive to many potential allies of the immigration-reform movement. And if immigration reformers need such allies to prevail, they need to hear how their own rhetoric sounds in the ears of others. Earl Ofari Hutchinson later told the Los Angeles Times that at every forum he sponsors, someone raises the issue of illegal immigration and that if Turner had come, “he would be met with thunderous applause.” But he never had the opportunity. For his part, Turner at least seems to understand the problem. “Rightly or wrongly we’re seen as being a bunch of angry white guys. … Our movement needs to enlarge the tent.”

Multicultural outreach is now an American cliché with its own set rituals, and the immigration-reform movement needs to start adopting them. It certainly must deal effectively with its own infiltrators—if it isn’t practical to bar neo-Nazis from its public events, it can certainly make itself repellant to them. Beyond that, it can and should engage in symbolic affirmative-action frippery that mainstream political groups in the United States adopt as a matter of course. It can acknowledge—loudly and without hesitation—that the United States has benefited from immigration in the past and will continue to do so in the future. It can proclaim that the country could do a better job at welcoming new immigrants if it took them in at rates at which they could be assimilated, economically and culturally. It can look harder for potential allies in the Hispanic community and ensure that their voices are amplified. (It won’t be difficult: the legendary farm-labor leader Cesar Chavez, after all, was no fan of illegal immigrants, for sound economic reasons.) And, of course—as in the overwhelming majority of cases it does—the reform movement should shun racist appeals and associations, which will always harm more than help.

If immigration reformers can’t figure out how to do these things in the next few years, they won’t have another chance.