Last night, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives passed legislation that would attempt to drastically clamp down on unlawful immigration through measures not including the President's proposed guest worker program. While this bill is certainly popular within some segments of the Republican base, as Jeffrey H. Birnbaum writes in a Washington Post article earlier this week, another key pillar of the GOP is none to happy with the direction of the party on this issue.

The House Republican leadership and the nation's business lobby, usually close allies, are battling each other over the issue of immigration.

In a rare schism, employer groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pressing to kill a Republican-sponsored measure that would require businesses to verify that all of their workers are in the United States legally and would increase penalties for hiring illegal employees.

Lobby groups including the chamber, the National Restaurant Association and the Associated General Contractors of America are so vehement in their opposition that they will consider lawmakers' votes on the bill a key measure of whether they will support them in the future.

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Lobbyists reached yesterday couldn't remember the last time that prominent business groups listed a vote against the Republican leadership as a "key vote" determining their organizations' view of a lawmaker's record.

The break between the corporatists and the nativists within the GOP is not the only potential schism to develop as a result of the issue of immigration, as the Los Angeles Times' political analyst Ronald Brownstein notes in a piece yesterday.

This legislation could present the party with the same risky political equation it faced in 1994, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, promoted Proposition 187 to bar illegal immigrants from most public services in California, including schooling. Though support for the proposition helped Wilson win reelection, most analysts agree that a backlash against it helped tilt the state toward the Democrats by increasing turnout among Latinos -- and souring those voters on GOP candidates.

Now, state Republicans find themselves on a similar tightrope as they try to satisfy activists urging tougher measures against illegal immigrants without again alienating Latino voters, who have only recently shown signs of reconsidering the GOP.

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Before Proposition 187, Republicans attracted as much as a third of the vote among California Latinos, as Wilson did in the 1990 governor's race.

After Proposition 187, GOP candidates failed to win even a quarter of the vote among California Latinos in the 1994, 1998 and 2002 governor's races and the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, according to Times exit polls. Compounding the damage, Latinos increased their share of the state's vote from 7% in the 1992 presidential race to twice that by 2004.

While it's clear that this enmity is developing on its own within the Republican Party, it would be foolish of Democrats to just sit back and watch. Real shifts in coalitions occur not only when specific issues begin to divide one party, but also when the other party has both the vision and prowess to exploit the divisions at their earliest stages.

If a substantial portion of the Republican base wants to institute initiatives that do not cohere with the aims of business, both large and small, the Democrats should not let business forget this. If this same segment of the GOP base trumpets nativist policies aimed at undercutting the liberties of some Hispanics, the Democrats should go to great lengths to remind Hispanic voters of the steps the Democratic Party has taken, and will continue to take, to ensure protection of the rights of all minorities -- and indeed all Americans.

The Republican Party might not be coming apart at the seems just yet, but it's evident that cracks are developing within its governing coalition. If the Democrats not only want to win elections in the short term but also build the base upon which future elections are won, the time is now to make full use of these nascent divisions within the GOP.