If the Democrats don’t do something about illegal immigration pretty soon, Tyrone Johnson says he will do something that he has never done before: vote Republican in the upcoming election.

Mr. Johnson, who is black, has been a loyal Democrat for the past three decades. He has marched against racial profiling and has rallied for affordable housing, particularly in Harlem, where he has always lived.

But when it comes to the immigration issue, he, like many other African Americans, has found some Republicans’ tough stance quite comforting.

“How can you have rights if you are not even a legal resident of this country?” Mr. Johnson, who was recently laid off from his job as a custodian, said. For the past decade, he worked for a small Manhattan-based cleaning company. A month ago, his supervisor told him that profits were down and that he and a few others had to go.

“They got rid of us so that they could hire these Mexicans who come here illegally and will work for less money, no benefits, and no health care. It’s not right. They are taking our jobs and they will work without a union,” he said.

In a city like New York, where half the black men are unemployed, it’s easy for some to believe that Hispanics and others are taking low-level jobs away from blacks.

They are wrong.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but the Republicans have seized on the right issue at the right time. With an election just around the corner, they have introduced a contentious debate about immigration that they cleverly concluded would fracture the Democrats’ most loyal base – African Americans.

In a year when the Republicans have launched a major initiative to win over new black voters, they have convinced black Americans like Mr. Johnson that illegal Hispanics are the cause of the black community’s social and economic misery. It’s a classic case of divide and conquer, but is it utter nonsense.

The problems that beset the black community are a combination of structural and personal barriers – not the result of the influx of immigrants.

The GOP successfully tried a similar tactic back in 2004, when Republicans made same-sex marriage a central issue in the presidential election. Before long, black preachers were forming strange alliances with conservatives whom they had denounced from the pulpit just weeks before. The issue was so polarizing that many blacks simply sat out on the presidential election and others abandoned the Democratic Party altogether.

According to a new poll by the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly a quarter of African Americans said they had personally lost a job to an immigrant or knew someone who had. Though blacks were more tolerant than whites about whether immigrants should be detained and deported once they are found, they were in agreement that immigrants have become a “burden” on American society.

At a time when blacks and Latinos already suffer from strained relations, the immigration issue has only made a bad situation worse and now threatens to fracture what was once a historic alliance, especially in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the two groups frequently lean on each other for votes.

The Republican attempts to single out Hispanics over other illegal immigrants, such as the Irish, has further racialized the debate and has convinced blacks on the lower economic rungs that Latinos are whom they must fear.

The fight between blacks and Latinos over the immigrant issue reflects a much larger battle over the struggle for power and the changing demographics of our nation, especially with the black population dwindling as a percentage of the population.

Democrats need to reframe the debate. The last time I checked, America – a nation of immigrants – is still big enough for all of us.