By PATRICK HEALY
 
Everywhere Steve Levy went last year in his successful campaign for Suffolk County executive, he said, he heard the same complaints. A new wave of Hispanic immigrants had swept Long Island, and many residents were furious about the overcrowded homes and lines of day laborers they saw in their towns. They told Mr. Levy they wanted action.

This month, Mr. Levy floated a proposal to deputize some Suffolk County police officers, giving them the power to detain people found to be in the United States illegally after being taken into custody on other charges. Right now, Suffolk police and corrections officers say, they are prohibited from asking immigrants whether they are in the country legally. Mr. Levy's proposal, which he later amended, was met by objections from the police unions.

Mr. Levy said his intent was to fight crime by focusing the effort on criminals like gang members, not ordinary immigrants. But advocacy groups and residents of Suffolk and Nassau Counties say the proposal is a sign of the times. They say the issue of illegal immigration is rapidly gathering political force in Long Island's patchwork of historically white suburban hamlets, and as the complaints grow, politicians are responding with get-tough rhetoric, crackdowns and new laws.

"Public opinion has changed," said Sue Grant, one of several Farmingville residents who rise each morning to stand on street corners and demonstrate against the day laborers in their community. "More and more people are coming forward and saying, 'I'm sick of this.' They don't want this anymore."

It is the latest knot in Long Island's wrenching struggle to digest the thousands of Hispanic immigrants - many of them day laborers - who have arrived in the past decade and at a record pace in the last three years, drawn by jobs in construction and landscaping and other blue-collar work. One result is a commensurate strain on public services like schools, garbage collection and sewer systems in an area where residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country.

Communities across the nation - from Mesa, Ariz., to Hoover, Ala., to Freehold, N.J. - have faced similar struggles. Day laborers have been shut out and demonstrated against, and have become the targets of political campaigns. There has been tension in many villages and cities and violence in isolated spots. But observers and local politicians said that rarely has the fight seemed so bitter or raged so long as on Long Island, where violence has erupted in recent years and Mr. Levy's proposal is just one of many with support from politicians and residents.

Long Island's stratified hamlets and villages, its history of segregation by race and by economic status, its need for cheap laborers to do work rejected by others and its lack of rental housing have set a unique stage for this fight, experts said.

"People came here in the 50's and 60's and early 70's thinking they were getting away from the problems of the city," said Stefan Krieger, who runs Hofstra University's Housing Rights Clinic. "In the city, with diversity, you celebrate it. Out here, not at all. You see different-color people on the street and for some reason, there's some dissonance."

That dissonance is growing louder, its tone more varied. While some communities like Glen Cove and Freeport have arranged for hiring halls for the day laborers who line street corners, others have roundly rejected the idea.

Farmingdale has stepped up traffic enforcement to discourage contractors from picking up day laborers, and several village officials say they are planning to demolish apartments that they say are chock full of immigrants. They argue that the buildings are rife with code violations and not worth preserving.

The Town of Brookhaven has set up an informal task force to investigate code violations and complaints about homes crowded with day laborers. A town councilwoman, Geraldine Esposito, said she was searching for ways to tighten the town's Neighborhood Preservation Act, further limiting the number of people in a home. "We're trying to solve a problem that's almost unsolvable for the town," she said. "Where are these men going to go? They should go back home to where their home is. There is no pot of gold here unless they can do it legally."

Campaigns for village and town offices have ramped up their rhetoric, promising to do everything possible to get day laborers off the streets.

Local officials say their actions and ideas are necessary, fair and colorblind. They said they are not singling out Hispanic immigrants, but are trying to break up the networks of overcrowded homes, unlicensed contractors and absentee landlords that exploit day laborers.

"It's been ignored, totally ignored," said Mr. Levy, a Democrat who was elected on a platform of fiscal austerity and better management of the county, on the eastern end of Long Island, and its roughly 1.5 million residents. "It's led to workers being exploited, houses being overcrowded and legitimate businesses going under. There's an undercurrent of frustration within the majority of Suffolk residents."

But laborers and advocacy groups say the new policies and aggressive rhetoric are coded attempts to drive Latino immigrants underground or off Long Island. They see parallels between policies denying black families homes in Levittown after World War II and a proposed law in Suffolk County asking federal officials to enforce immigration laws.

"It's like we're going backwards," said Irma Solis, an organizer at the Workplace Project, a Hispanic advocacy group in Farmingville. "It's another wave of attacks against the immigrant community."

Paul Tonna of Huntington, a Republican member of the Suffolk County Legislature, is a veteran of these wars. He defended day laborers, tried unsuccessfully to pass legislation to set up a hiring hall for them and earned many enemies in the process. Now leaving office because of term limits, Mr. Tonna says he has been asking himself, why Long Island?

One reason experts cite is persistent segregation on Long Island, named the country's most segregated suburb in a 2002 study by David Rusk, a consultant who analyzes suburban segregation patterns. In the 1950's and 60's, discriminatory practices by lenders, real estate agents and builders steered minorities and whites to different communities.

Today, there are villages - like Garden City and Hempstead, Copiague and Amityville - that sit next to each other, but have nearly opposite racial compositions.

Still, Mr. Tonna said, "It's not just bigotry. It's an economic issue."

Most of the problems bubbled up in heavily white, blue-collar communities - places where new immigrants, many of them upwardly mobile, could barely get a foothold. In wealthy East Hampton, the quarrels over immigration and code violations are not centered in the wealthy beachfront enclaves but in Springs, a middle-class neighborhood.

Long Island's Hispanic population grew by about 70 percent in a decade, according to the 2000 census. Between 2000 and 2003, it grew even faster, with the number of Hispanic residents of Suffolk jumping by 20 percent. That translates into an average of 10,387 people per year, compared with about 6,500 people per year during the 1990's.

Many newcomers are here illegally or on temporary visas, but there is no definitive data on their numbers.

Immigrants arrived in droves in relatively small communities, making it impossible for residents to ignore their new neighbors. Some 80 percent of Long Islanders own their homes, and there are few rental apartments, so laborers are often crammed into single-family homes.

And thanks to the island's relatively weak labor unions, they can find work by standing on street corners, Mr. Tonna said.

Some towns took the change in stride; others rejected it outright, with angry residents attending town and county legislative meetings to complain that the influx of immigrants has brought noise violations, littering, people drinking and urinating in public and driveways crammed with cars. They videotaped crowds of day laborers and staged demonstrations.

The tension first flared into violence in 2000, when two men posing as contractors kidnapped two Farmingville day laborers and beat them with a crowbar. In July 2003, a group of teenagers set fire to the house of a Mexican family in Farmingville.

Governments have responded to residents' complaints with bills intended either to accommodate the immigrants or to clamp down on them. There does not appear to be any particular geographical pattern to the measures. One community's anxiety does not necessarily seem to spread. Officials from various towns have proposed limiting the number of people in a house, banning the hiring of day laborers off the street and requiring identification from anyone using a village park.

But few ideas over the years have drawn as much fire as the one Mr. Levy first broached publicly about three weeks ago to give Suffolk police officers the authority to detain illegal immigrants taken into custody for a variety of offenses.

After a meeting last week with representatives of Hispanic groups, Mr. Levy changed his plan, proposing instead to give corrections officers broader powers in enforcing immigration laws and access to federal databases. He said he would also ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to assign three federal agents to the county to help identify and deport illegal immigrants in police custody.

If his plan is approved by federal officials, Mr. Levy said, the corrections officers would be trained by the Department of Homeland Security. They would not pluck immigrants off the street or sweep neighborhoods, he said, but would keep those charged with a crime in jail rather than allowing them to post bail.

Of the 23,150 arrests made by Suffolk police last year, 2,349 were of noncitizens. Mr. Levy said his proposal would increase the number of inmates who are handed over to federal immigration authorities, currently fewer than a dozen each year. His original plan was opposed by the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association, whose president, Jeff Frayler, said it would chill the relationship between immigrants and the police and make illegal immigrants less likely to report crimes. Mr. Levy said the plan would not apply to people whose illegal status was discovered while they were reporting crimes.

Despite criticism from Mr. Levy's own Hispanic Advisory Board, Mr. Frayler said, the county executive tapped a wealth of public support just by making the proposal.

"I think it's much larger than anyone could have believed," he said, "and Levy's catering to that crew."

This summer, Mr. Levy ordered a police sting operation to catch unlicensed contractors, many of whom hire day laborers. He said that during the next phase, police would ask contractors to produce federal I-9 forms, proving that their employees are legally authorized to work.

The new mayor of Farmingdale, George Graf, whose campaign literature attacked the former incumbent, Joseph Trudden - accusing him of allowing "our streets to be overrun with day laborers hanging out on our corners" - has stepped up fines against drivers who stop on Conklin Street, formerly a popular spot to pick up day laborers. Mr. Graf said the crowds have thinned as officers have issued tickets with $100 fines.

The new administration has also rekindled a plan to spend $6 million to $14 million to acquire six acres of land on Secatogue Avenue, where many Hispanic residents live in decrepit apartments near the Long Island Rail Road tracks, raze the buildings and replace them with condominiums for the elderly. "It will be before the public in the first quarter" of 2005, said the village attorney, Greg Carman. "This is going to move."

Residents of the apartment complex, which is privately owned, said that their ceilings leak, that their floors are caving in and that fetid smells drift up from the basement, but that they have few other places to move. Many were suspicious of the village's motives.

"It's very hard to rent a house without papers," said Ana Maria Cabrera, 22, who works in a shoe store in Northport. "If they are moving us from one place to another, it obviously means they don't want us around."