The raw emotion on this subject, which has been compared to the divisive nature of the civil rights movement, bubbled over last week as Congress grappled with potential solutions and protests erupted from Capitol Hill to Las Vegas. Immigrants, some of them here illegally, are essential to the Southern Nevada economy.

That fact, and the dichotomy some employers confront of needing cheap workers but opposing illegal immigration, is underscored when the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce sent out an alert this week. What is the chamber's stance in a county teeming with immigrants that is now 25 percent Hispanic?

"Several bills are up for discussion, many of which include strict, unfair and burdensome penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers. While the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce strongly opposes hiring illegal workers, it does not believe employers should be required to become an enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service," the chamber alert began.

So businesses hire illegals here, the chamber opposes that, but don't make them do anything about it. Sounds fair.

To amplify: "The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce believes that the need for immigration reform is necessary in order to find a legal way for foreign workers to participate in the economy in a manner than enables the government to know who is in the country. An estimated 10-12 million unauthorized immigrants currently live in the United States, and provide roughly 5% of the labor force. Nevada alone has an estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants in the state, many of whom fill vital jobs such as construction, gaming, and hospitality."

So they are filling vital jobs, which the chamber thinks is wrong, unless the government can find a way to make them legal and track them. Visionary, I tell you.

How? The chamber has ideas: Safeguard the borders (whatever that means), a guest worker program for immigrants "for hard to fill positions" (whatever that means), safeguard "immigrant and non-immigrant employee rights" (whatever that means) and "avoid wholesale amnesty for illegal immigrants (well, that's almost specific).

The chamber's mush notwithstanding, this issue is too complex and dicey, especially in Southern Nevada. The range of opinions on the subject came out during a taping of "Face to Face" this week, especially as a couple of activists representing groups with names such as Wake Up America and Secured Borders made their views known.

"Law is law," declared Lawrence Pappas of Secured Borders. "If we all have to abide by law, there is no simple law for one class of people and another class has to abide by it."

Even more extreme was Mark Edwards of Wake Up America, who devotes two hours a night to the topic on the radio and thinks it's outrageous that nurses learn Spanish to talk to patients.

"Who said that we should have X amount of Hispanics here and predominantly them? Why are we pandering to one particular race?" Edwards asked, becoming more indignant as time went on.

The real problem for politicians here is navigating through a minefield of nativism and racism without alienating a growing immigrant population or an increasingly angry white populace. The stronger your views, the more likely you are in the Pappas/Edwards camp.

And if that faction were to win Washington—and that seems unlikely so far but could change—the Las Vegas economy, as the chamber's attempt to have it all ways suggests, could be forever altered.