When immigrant janitors in Boston went on strike this fall, they attracted some unlikely allies. While students and religious and community leaders were quick to lend their authority to the cause, urging higher wages and better benefits for the 10,700 janitors who clean the city's gleaming office towers and stately campuses, the real surprise came in the form of corporate support for the janitors' demands. After weeks of public pressure, such business luminaries as FleetBoston Financial, State Street Corporation and John Hancock Financial Services weighed in for the cleaners, roughly half of whom are undocumented immigrants.

But even as throngs of purple-shirted workers staged nightly marches through downtown Boston, a crackdown on undocumented workers elsewhere in Massachusetts continued apace. On the same days that the janitors held major rallies, the INS launched raids in East Boston and on Cape Cod, rounding up dozens of Brazilian immigrants for deportation.

These seemingly contradictory developments are merely symptoms of the fundamental inconsistency of US policy on immigrant labor: On the one hand, the politics of antiterrorism dictates a get-tough, round-'em-up approach; on the other, we are a nation that depends more and more on immigrants to do our dirtiest jobs. The Republican Party itself is deeply split on this question. If the party's ideological purists were to win out, sealing borders in order to stem the tide of immigrant labor, whole sectors of the economy would collapse, making the business-minded segment of the party unhappy indeed.

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