2 conventions’ speakers spotlight nation’s divide over immigration

Trump builds coalition on walling out Mexicans; Clinton would ease citizenship path.

PHILADELPHIA — On the first day of their convention, Democrats heard moving speeches from an 11-year-old American girl worried about her undocumented mother getting deported, a “Dreamer” brought to the country as a child without proper papers, and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a fiery voice for compassionate treatment of immigrants.

It was a sharp contrast to the Republican convention last week, when three speakers on opening night were American parents who told searing tales of their children who died because of people living in the country illegally. Their dark stories contained appeals for more border control to stop immigrants from pouring into the U.S.

The divergence reflected a widening national gulf on immigration, an issue that has taken center stage in the 2016 presidential election in a year marked by increasing political polarization and heightened racial tensions.

Republican nominee Donald Trump built his coalition of supporters while vowing to build a wall on the Mexican border and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has leaned left toward a more pro-immigration platform as her party’s reliance on Hispanic voters grows.

“It surprises me, actually, that there’s been such a complete rejection and a complete inability to embrace the positive social and economic change that immigrants have done to build this country,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told Bloomberg Politics. “I don’t get where the Republicans think they’re going in the future as a party.”

Clinton has promised to introduce legislation in her first 100 days that would allow the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally to gain citizenship. She wants to support — and expand — President Barack Obama’s executive actions to give deportation relief and work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants, even though the president’s order is currently blocked by an appeals court ruling after a shorthanded Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on the legality of the program last month.

Fear of immigration has been a powerful undercurrent in the GOP for years, sinking legislative efforts in 2007 and 2013 to open up immigration laws.

But Trump has capitalized on it in a way that no presidential candidate has for generations. According to a 2015 Pew survey, a majority of Republicans believe immigrants have a negative impact on U.S. society, while a majority of Democrats believe they make America better.

“We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities,” Trump said in his convention speech last Thursday in Cleveland.

The real estate developer leapfrogged his Republican opponents in the primary while deriding undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and vowing to reduce future flows of legal immigration.

His brash rhetoric and racially tinged appeals struck a nerve with millions of older and blue-collar white voters who worry about the U.S. becoming less white and more Hispanic and Asian. The union representing U.S. border patrol agents issued its first-ever endorsement in a presidential primary for Trump.

“As Mr. Trump said, a government that doesn’t protect its own citizens is a government unworthy to lead,” Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to Trump, said in an email. Victims of immigration, he said, “have not had a voice: they’ve been coldly silenced again at the Democratic convention.”

The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. fell from 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.3 million in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. Despite high-profile murders, research shows that first-generation immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans or second-generation immigrants. The number of border patrol agents jumped from 10,000 in 2004 to 21,000 in 2012, according to the government. The number of Mexicans apprehended at the border fell to a near-historic low in 2015, before rising so far in 2016, according to preliminary figures.

“At the Republican convention, undocumented immigrants were depicted as the scary ‘other’ that are coming to kill ‘us.’ At the Democratic convention, undocumented immigrants speak up for themselves and demonstrate that they already are ‘us,’” said Frank Sharry, a pro-immigration activist. “In many ways, this election is a referendum on immigration reform — kick them out or let them stay.”

Democrats are determined to use Trump’s anti-immigration positions to turn Latino voters against the GOP in historic numbers come November. In his Wednesday primetime speech, Obama delivered a searing indictment of Trump as “homegrown demagogue” preying on fear and prejudice, and said Clinton offers a more hopeful vision.

“Hillary knows we can insist on a lawful and orderly immigration system while still seeing striving students and their toiling parents as loving families — not criminals or rapists — families that came here for the same reasons our forebears came: to work, and study, and make a better life, in a place where we can talk and worship and love as we please,” he said. “She knows their dream is quintessentially American, and the American Dream is something no wall will ever contain.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., gave an impassioned speech at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia on Monday, condemning the bigotry faced by his Puerto Rican parents.

AP PHOTOS Sabine Durden speaks alongside Jamiel Shaw and Mary Ann Mendoza at the Republican Convention July 18. All three had children killed by undocumented immigrants.