WASHINGTON - The statement smacked of the rhetoric that circulated 40 years ago when some whites tried to explain their opposition to blacks’ efforts to achieve equality during the civil rights movement.

"I don’t have anything against Latinos," said the Bishop Frank Stewart as he gathered with nine other black speakers at an anti-immigration press conference here last month at the National Press Club. "I have Latinos in my organization. But Latinos have an agenda, and we are not included in it."

As they have for more than 160 years, bigotry and racism have surfaced as the country takes up the issue of immigration reform, political scientists and sociologists say.

Politicians of both parties say they have begun to sense an undercurrent of bigotry in the debate over what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants already here and the hundreds of thousands who annually want to enter legally.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2008, told a group of reporters here recently "that some anti-immigration Republicans are guilty of demagoguery and racism."

"I’m not saying everybody who is very, very angry" about immigration "is a racist. I want to be very clear about that," he said. "But I’ve had conversations with people, and it became evident what they really didn’t like is that people didn’t look like them, didn’t talk like them and didn’t celebrate the holidays they do, and they just had a problem with it."

Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada raised the issue when the Senate took up an amendment to the immigration bill it approved last month to mandate English as the nation’s official language.

"While the intent may not be there, I really believe this amendment is racist," Reid said on the Senate floor. "I think it is directed basically to people who speak Spanish."

The bill now goes to a conference committee between selected members of both houses who will try to hammer out a compromise that they can present later to both bodies for a final vote. President George W. Bush and others, such as Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the House majority whip, have brushed aside concerns that there is an undercurrent of racism in the immigration discussion.

"It’s a big country with lots of people, and I don’t know what all of them are thinking," Blunt said. "But I don’t get a sense of that when I’m out in the country, and I’ve been all over the country in a couple of years. I don’t see it as a racial thing. I can’t speak for everybody, but I don’t sense that with the people that I talk to."

But many say it is there.

"I think very few people are comfortable talking about race and racism," said Mickey Ibarra, a former official in the Clinton administration who now runs a Washington-based public affairs company.

"My own brother was walking in a demonstration in Salt Lake City, and he had folks screaming at him to ‘Go home!’ And he and I were both born here."

Sunita Parikh, associate professor of political science at Washington University, said bigotry is part of the immigration debate today just as it was during the arrivals of Germans and the Irish during the 1840s and the arrival of Italians, Poles and Russian Jews in the early 1900s.

"There are a lot of similarities in the rhetoric now compared to how the Italians and eastern Europeans were talked about 100 years ago, especially Russian and Polish Jews," said Parikh, who specializes in immigration.

"There were concerns about the Italians, that they wouldn’t learn English, weren’t educated enough to contribute to the country. With Jews, there was a lot of anti-Semitic language - they look funny; they dress funny. That’s why you got a lot of temperance laws passed during those periods. The people who were here were convinced that the Catholics who were coming in were heavy drinkers. It happened to the Germans too."