Immigration issues took center stage at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday night. It was so crowded that many people watched the proceedings on TV outside the room.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

The mean season is here.

It has settled in at the governor’s office, in the General Assembly, on the radio talk shows, wherever people meet and wherever they sit down to send off e-mails.

Last Monday, I asked Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin what reaction he’d received from joining other religious leaders in decrying Governor Carcieri’s executive order cracking down on illegal immigrants.

He reported that it was “predictably angry” and that some of the e-mails, letters and calls were so vile he couldn’t repeat them.

“What they don’t get is that sense that, in debating the policy issues, what we’re losing sight of is the broad and more important values about compassion and taking care of people who are already in our midst.”

He added, “They’re saying things like, ‘You should be supporting the laws.’ They’re saying things like, ‘If you want these illegals in the country, you should be taking care of them yourself,’ which ignores the fact we’re doing a lot of things to help lots of people in the state regardless of their documentation.”

On Wednesday, as people flocked to the State House to press their cases for and against bills on both sides of the immigration issue, the Rev. Bernard Healey, the diocesan lobbyist, told me the bishop also was getting pounded on the talk shows. Even so, Father Healey said, the bishop does not regret getting involved. “I think the bishop regrets that so many people have taken unreasonable stances on this and demonized immigrants — the undocumented and documented — and turned this into an us/them. We’re all children of God.”

I haven’t seen the correspondence the bishop gets, but here’s the kind of e-mail that comes my way. Keith Elliott, of Harrisville, writes:

“I hope you will wake up tomorrow and realize that 90% or more of the state is fully behind the governor and his stand against the illegal scum that has infiltrated our state and our country and continues to drag down our resources. Only the illegal aliens themselves and their many friends and relatives would be opposed to such a measure. What’s your excuse?”

I wonder if, through a magic wand or an act of Congress, illegals were turned into legals, it would ease the minds of people who are obsessed with this issue, or whether — not in all cases but certainly many — there is a deeper-seated prejudice at work.

The debate raging in Rhode Island over illegal immigration is one of the most distressing episodes I have chronicled in a career of more than 40 years.

You have to go back to the 1991 collapse of the credit unions and the subsequent storm over the size and pace of a state bailout of depositors to find so many people whipped into this frenzy.

It’s tricky to compare one crisis with another, but it’s certainly true that Rhode Island has seen other dark times.

I think of the trauma of events in 2000: the accidental fatal shooting of Cornel Young Jr., an off-duty black Providence policeman, by two white colleagues, and the execution-style slaying of 15-year-old Jennifer Rivera, whom authorities failed to protect even as she was about to testify in a murder trial.

The Young and Rivera tragedies produced a special anger in minority communities.

I think of the scandals that saw a former governor, a former Providence mayor, and a former Pawtucket mayor go to jail and two Supreme Court chief justices forced to resign amid impeachment inquiries.

Yet the immigration furor can be said to outstrip them all. It is deliberately fanned by politicians, and there is a rawness and abrasiveness in the comments of the citizens they are appealing to.

Not all politicians are in on this, of course. Indeed, most aren’t. But with a couple of conspicuous exceptions, most notably Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, who early on decried the governor’s order, they are subdued. You don’t see a rush of high-profile pols calling for an end to the madness.

Reporters shouldn’t have to seek these folks out. Sure, it’s easier for the poobahs not to get involved. I prefer to think they should have the wisdom and the courage to seize the initiative.

Amid a leadership vacuum in the aftermath of Young’s death, I wrote, “I cry for Rhode Island today … Where are our politicians when we need them? ... What are they doing to heal the breach? What are they doing to address underlying or related issues?”

I ask the same questions today about the immigration storm. And where are the leaders of business and the professions?

I did have an interesting conversation at the State House on Wednesday with the AFL-CIO’s George Nee, who was waiting to testify against one of the reactionary immigration bills and who said of the debate raging through Rhode Island, “We are spiraling into hysteria and name calling. And I thought we had made more progress than this.”

A House Judiciary Committee hearing that night on various pieces of legislation — for example, blocking immigrants from getting driver’s licenses or housing assistance, or, on the other side, barring landlords and others from asking about a person’s immigration status — actually was civil. I guess folks were determined to be on their best behavior. And it can be especially challenging to do that amid such a classic State House environment: a meeting in a room far too small, with no set time to begin, with too many bills on the agenda, with the session going late into the night.

The immigration bills in House Judiciary are expected to languish this year. Before you breathe a sigh of relief, consider that, as a result, frustration may grow even more. I don’t expect anyone to retreat from this battle any time soon.

In fact, House Labor has approved a bill to require employers to verify electronically the citizenship of new hires.

While it’s the right-wingers who continually strafe me on immigration issues and who raise my ire, I have to say that the other side can disappoint as well. I thought critics of Carcieri’s order did themselves and their cause a disservice when on April 3 they stormed the governor’s policy office in a protest that nearly turned violent.

That played right into the hands of Rep. Peter Palumbo, D-Cranston, one of the hardliners on illegal immigration, who told me, “The people that are fired up are not on our side.” His side, he said, hasn’t sought to “bust into the governor’s room.”

The fact that this is a terrible budget year, that poor people are targeted for service cuts and the GOP governor and Democratic legislators are so down on raising taxes, intensifies the immigration debate.

I spoke last week with Democratic U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about waves of prejudice against immigrants in American history.

He said, “Those concerns are worse at times of economic distress. When people are seeing their wages go sideways or down and every expense go up, and the schools failing and they’re looking around at being the first generation whose children they think may be worse off than they were, you start to look at who’s to blame, and if you’re working hard, it doesn’t seem like it’s you. And if the governor offers up another group to blame, then he sets a lot of forces into motion he may not have intended.”

I wonder if you caught Carcieri’s hourlong appearance last week on projo.com. You never know whom you’re going to find in a chat room: I noticed that Jenn Steinfeld of Marriage Equality RI was plugged in and following the back and forth. Later, she told me, “I care about attacks on families in our state. I work particularly on same-sex couples, but immigrant families are under attack and I can’t just stand by and watch that happen.”

I said Carcieri would say it’s only illegals he’s after. Steinfeld said, “It may be that that’s what his goal is, but … it becomes about ethnic and racial minorities and especially people who don’t speak English as a first language, and it’s scary and it’s dangerous … Any of us who are different should be afraid.”

Outside House Judiciary, I saw Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, who may be best known for his commitment to abortion rights. The doctor, whose background is Puerto Rican, said of the governor’s order and of the crackdown bills, “Immigrants are not to be blamed for the economic situation of the state and that’s what these kinds of proposals are implying.”

Carolina Bernal, who works for the Institute for Labor Studies and Research, said, “It’s very unfortunate that our governor is attacking the most vulnerable people of our state.” She said it would be better if he focused on real issues like housing and employment.

Bernal came from Ecuador in 1987. She told me she overstayed her visa but then, through a lottery, obtained a green card and eventually became a citizen.

She said undocumented people contribute to the economy by filling jobs — it’s often said they’re jobs no one else will take — and paying taxes and contributing to Social Security even though they are not eligible to collect Social Security benefits.

(Indeed, Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal says it’s impossible to know if illegal immigrants hurt the state’s economy more than they help it.)

Jhan Frias, a Feinstein High School senior who came from the Dominican Republic, told me, “Regardless of illegal or legal, we’re all human.”

Sen. Juan Pichardo, who may be Rhode Island’s most famous Dominican, says steps like the governor’s order and the various get-tough bills “increase the fear in people and also the animosity between certain groups toward the Latino community.” He says, “The frustration of having a very difficult budget — they blame the undocumented.”

At the State House, I met Veronica Brown of Cranston, an insurance company secretary. She asserted, “They broke the laws by getting in the country illegally, and they’re costing us money … My taxes go up to support people that are here illegally.”

It is hard to get across to Carcieri and others who target illegal immigrants that taking steps to punish them also raises suspicions against people who are here legally and makes their lives difficult.

Perhaps the closest thing to an acknowledgement of that, or an expression of sympathy about it, was from Rep. Joe Trillo, R-Warwick, who told me, “Any time people get hurt, whether they’re legal or illegal, it bothers me. I don’t like to see anybody get hurt, but the taxpayers are getting hurt right now — substantially.”

He said people are moving out of state because taxes here are so high. “They just don’t want to keep paying these bills.”

Everyone who rants against illegals asserts they are a drain on public services. Of course, reliable figures are scarce. Trillo said it’s not necessary to pin down the exact tab. He said, “Are you suggesting we shouldn’t do anything until we have every dollar in place? Because what we’re trying to do as a state is protect the taxpayers that are paying the bill for all these services.”

(Trillo also inveighs against overgenerous compensation packages for state and municipal employees.)

One reason I get upset by those who obsess about immigrants is that it instinctively offends an idealistic notion I have of America. I continue to be inspired by lines, written by Emma Lazarus you see at the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Spare me the assertion that your grandparents came here legally. You can hardly compare immigration laws — or ease of entry — now with then. Do you think the undocumented enjoy being illegal? By and large, don’t you think they would have preferred to come on the up and up if that had been doable?

And if you insist that, really, you’d embrace immigrants if they were legal, what are you doing to get Congress to make that a more realistic possibility?

And please don’t tell me you’d insist that all the undocumented here be sent home first before they could come back, especially if you contend that as many as 20 million or 30 million have streamed in here. That would be some airlift!

One other thing: Terry Gorman, executive director of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, sports a badge with the slogan, “Silence is Consent.”

He says illegals are emptying the treasury, and he says the slogan means, “If we don’t speak up, these abuses are okay.”

I embrace the slogan, “Silence is Consent,” but I’d apply it differently. I’d say that if you are upset by Carcieri, Gorman, Palumbo, Trillo, the talk show folks or anyone else who is waging this war, speak out. When you are silent, they think you agree with them.

Wouldn’t you rather stand up to meanness?

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com