By Marcelo Ballvé, New America Media

The Tea Party movement has energized activism against President Obama's vision for immigration reform.

The link between Tea Partiers and immigration politics developed last
summer, when the impact of illegal immigration on the health care
system became a prominent side issue in town hall debates.

Since then, illegal immigration has steadily gained ground on the Tea Party agenda.

Immigration "is one of our main issues in the state of North Carolina,"
said David DeGerolamo, co-founder of Tea Party group NC Freedom, in a
phone interview. "And what it comes down to is that the United States
is a republic based on the rule of law. What part of illegal is right?"

DeGerolamo is scheduled to give a talk today on "How to Unite State Tea
Party Groups" at the National Tea Party Convention, which began
yesterday in Nashville.

The Nashville event has devoted a good share of its spotlight to
activists devoted to promoting get-tough policies against illegal
immigrants and blocking White House plans to offer a path to legal
status for the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants.

These activists label such legislation as amnesty, and they helped
derail a similar effort in 2007 that had the backing of then-President
George W. Bush.

Tom Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman whose signature issue was
illegal immigration, was yesterday's kick-off speaker at the Nashville
convention, which is headlined by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Tancredo served 10 years in the House beginning in 1999, but gained
widespread notoriety in 2002 when he called for the deportation of an
undocumented honors student after a newspaper wrote about his inability
to gain in-state tuition for college.

Also leading a session at the convention is NumbersUSA, a Washington,
D.C. organization that advocates for lower immigration levels.

In the Tea Parties, groups like NumbersUSA discovered a new opportunity
to spread and amplify their message, said Devin Burghart, who tracks
the Tea Party movement from Seattle for the Institute for Research and
Education on Human Rights.

"It has become far more common for Tea Party groups to discuss the
topic of undocumented immigrants at events and on their websites," he
said. "In terms of their long-term planning it is clearly becoming a
part of their agenda."

Of course, the links between hardline immigration activists and Tea
Partiers don't necessarily add up to a united front on immigration.

With a movement as fractured, fast changing and diffuse as the Tea
Parties, it's difficult to establish a clear idea of activists' views
on a single issue.

"Immigration is not a part of the movement's 'platform,'" Keli
Carender, a prominent Tea Party blogger and speaker at the Nashville
convention, wrote in e-mail to New America Media. "I'm sure every
person involved in the movement has their own personal views on
immigration, and though they may be espoused from time to time, they ...
may not be representative of anyone else in the movement."

Individual candidates linked to the Tea Party movement, however, have embraced the illegal immigration issue.

Judge Roy Moore, who is running as a conservative in Alabama's 2010
governor's race and will speak in Nashville, has made immigration one
of the five topics covered in his platform.

Moore is known for his refusal as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme
Court to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state
courthouse.

"Definitely, he's against illegal immigration," said Moore spokesman
John Wahl. "There are a lot of things that can be done. There's things
like making the official language [in Alabama] English. That's just
common sense when you think about it." Moore also supports state laws
to penalize undocumented immigrant workers.

Moore's support for establishing English as an official language in
Alabama is part of a wave of similar "English first" proposals that
have caught on in state houses and city council chambers, in part
thanks to the efforts of anti-illegal immigration activists. The issue
has caught on with Tea Partiers, too.

For example, "official English" made a strong showing in the "Contract
from America," a document being prepared online with input from Tea
Partiers nationwide. The contract will signal the Tea Party movement's
policy priorities ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.

Of the various immigration policy proposals submitted, "An Official
Language of the United States" won the most votes. And it ranked eighth
overall -- higher than interstate health insurance competition and just
below a proposal to end lifetime salary and benefits for members of
Congress.

The contract, which will be finalized this spring, has won praise from
former House majority leader Dick Armey who heads FreedomWorks, the
Washington, D.C.-based conservative group that has promoted Tea Party
activism.

In the Florida Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat, Tea
Party-fueled upstart conservative Marco Rubio has been pressed to take
a more vocal stance against illegal immigration as he tries to steal
the primary away from sitting Governor Charlie Crist, a moderate.

Javier Manjarres, 37, a Colombian-American conservative activist in
South Florida, uploaded a video on YouTube Jan. 26 in which he grills
Rubio on immigration and reminds the candidate of his opposition to "any form of amnesty for immigrants who have broken federal law and
stayed in our country illegally."

The video was meant to showcase Rubio's views on illegal immigration
after conservatives who accused him of being soft on the issue had
heckled the candidate at a forum in Broward County, Manjarres said. "I
think he just had to become more vocal. I think he's always had these
views. He just never really had to defend them."

"Immigration is huge" with the Florida Tea Partiers, said Manjarres,
who heads his own Ft. Lauderdale-based organization, Conservative
Republican Alliance and moves in conservative and Tea Party circles. "Everyone knows what's at stake there. The immigration issue will be as
big as health care."

Manjarres's organization was among the first to endorse Rubio's candidacy.

In Martin County, Fla., north of Palm Beach, the Martin 9-12 Tea Party
Committee lists "enforcement of immigration laws," along with limited
government and lower taxes, as one of its conditions for candidate
endorsements.

The Tea Partiers' connection to immigration was forged last summer and
fall, when the health care and immigration debates fused at Tea Party
events and protests. One such event was an August town hall event in
Raleigh, N.C. organized by DeGerolamo, NC Freedom's co-founder.

Two of the four invited speakers were prominent immigration
restrictionists: William Gheen, head of Americans for Legal Immigration
Political Action Committee (ALIPAC) and John Armor, a lawyer associated
with the American Civil Rights Union.

On YouTube videos of the event, Gheen warns the Tea Partiers about
Obama's "massive amnesty" plan to legalize undocumented immigrants, and
both Gheen and Armor described the problem of "anchor babies."

Immigration restrictionists have long alleged immigrant mothers enter
the country illegally to give birth on U.S. soil so that their children
will have citizenship and eventually, through family reunification
visas, be able to pass legal status to the rest of the family.

At the same Aug. 26 town hall, Ada Fisher, Republican National
Commiteewoman for North Carolina, earned a loud round of applause for
this statement criticizing federal laws requiring multilingual medical
interpreters: "You cannot be one nation under God when everyone's
speaking something different."

Not everyone agrees that Tea Party organizing has begun exerting a
significant influence on the immigration debate at a national level.

Tamar Jacoby, a conservative who heads ImmigrationWorks USA, a
pro-immigration business group, agrees that Tea Partiers may take up
immigration in earnest in the future.

But for the time being, she sees the Tea Partiers still in a very early
stage of organizing and far more zeroed-in on limited government and
fiscal issues.

And the Tea Party movement's allies in the political establishment,
Republicans like Armey of FreedomWorks and former Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin, still have a chance to influence the course Tea Party activism
will take on issues such as immigration, Jacoby said. "Leadership will
matter. What Palin and Armey say will be very important."

Palin and Armey are hardly firebrands on the immigration issue.

Armey, as Jacoby pointed out, is an "old friend" of immigration reform.
Armey has spoken out about making the system "more orderly" but "not
more restrictive."

Palin's position on immigration is still hazy. In a recent interview on
the Glenn Beck program she said, "I think Republicans, conservatives
are at fault when we allow the other side to capture this immigration
issue and try to turn this issue into something negative for
Republicans," she said, according to a Fox News transcript.

Palin stressed immigration laws should be followed, but added, "We need to continue to be so welcoming."

Whatever the ultimate Tea Party effect is on immigration politics,
candidates and elected officials often come to recognize there is a
political cost to taking hard-line stances, said Stephen Fotopulos of
the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

Fotopulos cited the example of Harold Ford, Jr. who ran "sensationalist
ads about being tough on illegal immigrants" when he ran for office in
Tennessee. Now, Ford is campaigning for U.S. Senate in New York, where
the immigrant vote is powerful.

"We will see those ads again, used against him," said Fotopulos.

(Photo of Tea Party protest by Sage Ross via Wikimedia Commons)