This doesn't sound good at all:

Most ominously, the Ku Klux Klan has been increasingly active in northern Alabama and southeastern Tennessee, using immigration to revive its white-supremacist message.

That's from Clay Risen's New Republic piece on rising anti-immigration sentiment in the south. Much has been written on the ways in which racism helped to cripple the rise of the welfare state in the United States. Anger at immigrants, especially Mexicans, could easily do the same. The San Francisco Chronicle did a long story recently on the backlash against Hispanic workers coming in to New Orleans and doing work for rock-bottom wages. There's not really a happy answer to tell anybody here. I used to think that the immigration issue would split apart the Republican Party, caught between its Tom Tancredo nativist wing and its need to appeal to Hispanic voters. But that might be the wrong way to look at it.