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“That has something to do with being white. It also has something to do with living in New York City, or in Boston, or Philadelphia. In the big cities, all immigrants without status have a certain protection, because they’re viewed as necessary and welcome.

“It’s in the heartlands of America, in the ‘exurbs’, in the southern states that are experiencing fast waves of arrivals, where the backlash is most intense.

“But as the backlash and crackdown intensify, some Irish will get caught up in workplace raids and in detention and deportation. So they’re not protected by their white skin, even if they are protected to a certain extent by living in big cities.”

In Ireland recently to work with organisations here, Sharry is blunt in his assessment of the Government’s work on immigration.

“The Irish Government is courageous in standing up for the Irish undocumented in the States. But when it turns around and says we’re not going to allow ‘bridging visas’ for undocumented workers here because it would be an ‘amnesty’ that would reward illegal behaviour, the blatant hypocrisy of that statement astounds me.”

(The ‘bridging visa’ is a proposed temporary visa that would be given to people whose visas have run out through no fault of theirs.)

“One would hope for a recognition that what’s good for the undocumented Irish in the US would be good for the small number of undocumented in Ireland.”

For Sharry, who looks curiously like Eddie Hobbs and talks like one of the staffers on The West Wing, the failure of the “comprehensive immigration reform” bill in the US Senate last June was “a crushing blow”.

“But that doesn’t compare to the personal effect on people who live in fear every day.”

The window for reform opened due to odd circumstances. President George W Bush had “one unusual liberal position” – that he was “open minded” on immigration reform, Sharry says. Senator John McCain had earned political capital with Bush because of his support for Bush in the 2004 election (McCain had been touted as a possible vice-presidential candidate on a bipartisan ticket with John Kerry), and was prepared to cash that in to support immigration reform. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy had worked with McCain on earlier bids at reform.

“We married them up and said, let’s go to town,” says Sharry.

“We stretched from the left to try and win more votes on the right – but the more we stretched, the more we lost support on the left.

“And it turned out the President had no political capital. Republicans were looking for an opportunity to vote against the President.”

What they came up with was “a 21st century regulatory regime, combining enhanced enforcement with enhanced legal channels for migration”, says Sharry.

But the bill itself had become an unwieldy and unlovable piece of compromise legislation, 790 pages long. It provoked outrage on the right but failed to fire the passions of the left.

“We were saying, ‘the bill’s flawed but it should move forward’,” recalls Sharry.

“The right were saying, ‘it’s an amnesty and it’s horrible for America’.

“It turns out the public heard two messages: it’s an amnesty and it’s flawed.”

Sharry knew their chances of having it passed at the outset were “at best 50/50”.

“We were trying to legalise 12 million people of colour, who were poor, whose first act in this country was to violate our laws.”

But he and his colleagues had sought to focus the debate on the practical policy issues. What they didn’t realise until late in the campaign was that the debate had moved on without them.

“It moved from a policy discussion to ‘we don’t want those poor brown people’. The debate became one about race, with echoes of earlier, uglier debates.

“Many Americans have projected onto Latinos their fears about African Americans.”

The campaign against immigration reform became “a wholesale effort to make life so miserable for people on the lowest rung of society that they leave this society.”

Sharry now calls this a “a racist uprising”, but was unwilling to call it such at the time.

“When people on our left called the anti-immigrants ‘racists’, they loved it – it played for them.”

The consequence was not only that the reform bid was defeated, but that the campaign against the bill energised the anti-immigrant movement, moving the Republican Party to the right in the process.

Now, even Democrats are saying, “we’ve gotta throw immigrants under the bus.”

From attempting to persuade Republicans to back an enforcement-heavy bill, immigration lobbyists are now “trying to persuade Democrats from going anti-immigrant in an election year stunt to try and show swing voters that they’re tough.”

The experience has sent Sharry back to basics. It is time, he says, to “raise the moral stakes” and “take on” the key issues of race and class.

“Do we want to be the country that becomes smaller and meaner and gets tough on ‘the other’? What kind of country and what kind of values do we talk about?

“That’s where the debate is going to be won or lost.”

This story was produced with the assistance of the Forum on Migration and Communications.