PROVIDENCE — As on most mornings last October, the radio chatter that day centered on the Red Sox’ ever-changing fortunes in the playoffs. That is, until Governor Carcieri made one of his frequent appearances on a talk-radio program.

His on-air banter with WHJJ host Helen Glover started with the budget deficit, but soon wound its way to the volatile topic of immigration when a caller asked Carcieri why the court system must pay English-language interpreters.

The governor praised the caller, saying he also wondered “why in God’s name” the state provides interpreters “for people who want benefits from us.”

“My grandparents emigrated from Italy,” he said. “My mother didn’t speak English. She learned it.”

It was, some said, a flashpoint in Rhode Island’s increasingly testy debate over illegal immigration.

Civil rights and community advocates demanded an apology. Carcieri stood his ground, saying the comments were misinterpreted. And then something happened that caught many people by surprise. The governor’s position caught fire.

In the months that followed, Carcieri was praised by hundreds of readers on the Journal’s Web site, projo.com, despite his poor approval rating in a February poll. He even won support from Democratic legislators eager to crack down on illegal immigration.

“There’s no question those comments served to galvanize his base of support. It just was so in your face,” says Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The debate over illegal immigration vaulted to the top of the state’s political conversation, soaring over such issues as the lagging economy. It intensified in March when Carcieri issued a controversial executive order directing the state police and correctional officers to seek federal training that would enable them to enforce some immigration laws and requiring companies doing business with the state to verify the immigration status of new hires.

Ultimately, the candidate who came into office as the jobs governor — a businessman who pledged to fix the state’s anemic economy — and ran his second-term campaign on the promise of better schools may be remembered most for his tough stance on immigration.

Carcieri has declined the Journal’s requests to explain his position.

His team disputes any change in focus. Immigration, they say, was always a key priority. But before 2007, Carcieri’s name appeared in The Journal just a handful of times in connection with immigration issues. In 2008 alone, that number jumped to almost 100.

Critics say Carcieri is diverting attention from what Rhode Islanders really care about: the state’s worst budget crunch in two decades and the second-highest unemployment rate nationwide. A Brown University poll released last week indicated that just over 5 percent of Rhode Islanders list immigration as a top political priority. More than 75 percent of respondents said the state is headed in the wrong direction. The economy topped their list of concerns.

“I think it was more of a confluence of events that brought him to immigration,” said Maureen Moakley, a political science professor at the University of Rhode Island. “He had not been very successful in terms of pushing for jobs and economic development early in his administration, so by his second term he moved on to be the education governor. While those efforts were well intended, those are long-term endeavors you aren’t going to see a lot of results from. Then he started to talk about immigration on talk radio and it really resonated across the political spectrum.”

Jessica M. Vaughn, senior policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates stricter limits on immigration, says the governor’s progression is hardly unexpected.

“The immigration issue is directly related to the job market and the fiscal cost of government and education, so it’s very understandable that when a policymaker starts to get into [trying to solve] issues of runaway expenses, they are going to find that immigration policy has played a role in making those problems worse,” Vaughn said.

The cost here of illegal immigrants remains largely a mystery, even as the state grapples with a $425-million budget deficit. Carcieri has said the price tag for social services, health care and education hovers in the millions, but he has acknowledged that it is difficult to pinpoint that number.

RHODE ISLAND is not alone. With Congress’ failure to enact immigration reform, states have attempted to solve the problems on their own, Vaughn says.

Minnesota and Idaho have seen executive orders similar to Carcieri’s, while Arizona, Colorado and others have approved stricter laws against illegal immigration.

In Massachusetts, where politics runs just as blue as in Rhode Island, Governor Patrick this summer signed a very different type of executive order, launching a statewide initiative to find ways to help integrate immigrants. His plan calls on state officials and other stakeholders to coordinate a series of meetings soliciting public input before drafting a report with formal policy recommendations by next summer. It does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, drawing criticism from conservative groups.

Other New England states, meanwhile, have largely stayed out of the immigration debate.

In Rhode Island, the outcome of Carcieri’s executive order of five months ago has been either divisive or productive, depending on whom you talk to.

Talk-radio callers have embraced it, as have readers who have posted their opinions on projo.com. A dozen Democratic legislators have publicly supported Carcieri’s efforts. Finally, they said, Rhode Island was waking up to the problem. But others, including clergy members and Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman, criticized the plan.

In July, when 50 immigration agents and 12 state police detectives swept into 6 Rhode Island courthouses and arrested 31 maintenance workers on suspicion of being illegal immigrants, the incident further polarized the sharp and sometimes smoldering debate.

FORMER GOVERNOR Lincoln Almond, a fellow Republican, said illegal immigration is no greater a problem today than it was in the 1990s when he was governor, or prior to that in his more than two decades as U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island.

“All I can tell you is that I don’t see any difference between now and 20 years ago,” Almond said in a recent interview. “I have a feeling there’s a lot of rhetoric going on.”

He stopped short of directly criticizing Carcieri’s order, but said he wouldn’t have issued one. “I wouldn’t see a need for it,” the former governor said. “I think we are an enforcement state already. … If there are people among us who are committing crimes, then they should be the focus.”

Almond said his days as U.S. Attorney taught him that immigrant communities can offer valuable law-enforcement resources to help weed out wrongdoers. If illegal immigrants fear deportation, they’ll be less likely to work with the police to help weed out criminals.

“You don’t want to alienate that,” Almond said.

Carcieri maintains his order will give law-enforcement officials the tools they need to uphold state laws. But his critics — among them former members of his Hispanic Advisory Commission — say he’s using that as an excuse, instilling public fear where none belongs and enlisting the state police as “his army.”

“It’s a tremendous diversion from what’s really going on in our state,” said Brown, of the ACLU. “Immigration is at the bottom of the list when it comes to public concern, and yet we have a governor that’s making immigration his biggest issue. He feels he can get some political mileage out of this issue, so that’s what he’s focusing on.”

Diversion or not, the topic remains a hot-button issue.

“After attempting to grapple with larger issues like economic development and coping with the tough realities of affecting change in policy,” says URI’s Moakley, Carcieri “hit on something that resonated across a broad spectrum of voters and, frankly, gave him the momentum he needed to push through.”

Coming tomorrow: Courthouse arrests raise questions about state contracts

cneedham@projo.com