Those political situations included tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees who fled their countries in 1993 and 1994 to seek asylum in the United States. And in California in 1994, as anti-immigrant sentiment crested, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 187, a ballot measure intended to deny benefits, including public schooling, to illegal immigrants. The proposition has not gone into effect because of legal challenges.

The Republicans seized on the rising popular resentment against immigrants to thrust the issue into the Presidential election with a major bill cracking down on illegal immigration. The bill was included in a catchall spending measure that President Clinton signed into law on Sept. 30. The issue arose in the campaign when Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and the Republican Presidential nominee, threw his support behind a provision that would have allowed states to deny public education to illegal immigrant children.

President Clinton objected to the ban and threatened to veto the measure. A number of Republican mayors and governors in states with large immigrant populations (as well as many electoral votes), like New York, Texas and Illinois, also opposed the education ban, and it was ultimately dropped.

For Mr. Clinton, however, the immigration bill was a mixed success. While it reinforced many Administration priorities, like hiring more Border Patrol agents, it also contained some provisions that appalled immigrants' rights groups. They charged that the measure gutted anti-discrimination rules protecting immigrants in the workplace, raised new barriers to refugees seeking asylum and stripped most courts of their power to block potentially illegal Government policies.

''The Administration has been willing to stand its ground against extremes when it's clear it's politically safe,'' said Cecilia Munoz, deputy vice president of the Council on La Raza, a civil rights group in Washington. ''But the White House can also be accused of backing down on critical matters of principle, like civil rights and refugee protection.''

The Politics

Fueling Passions On Left and Right

Immigration is one of the trickiest and most emotional issues in contemporary politics, with odd alliances cutting across political lines. Anti-immigrant fever has stirred such passions that even liberal California Democrats have tried to outdo each other with border-control proposals.

Republicans attempted, unsuccessfully, to push a measure that would discourage even legal immigrants. That effort was killed last spring by a coalition of high-technology companies, grass-roots immigrants' groups, civil liberties organizations and conservative think tanks. They argued that such moves would keep families apart and bar the entry of new entrepreneurial talent.