All of us in America, except for the tribes we've shuffled into specially reserved little corners of the landscape, are either immigrants or descended from them. But since the Sept. 11 attacks, racial stereotyping and fear have held sway as if that weren't our history. As a Republican senator struggles for conservative credibility in his bid for the presidency while maintaining a relatively moderate position on US immigration, and an African-American Democrat with a Kenyan father and American mother vies for his party's nomination, journalist Geraldo Rivera and poet activist Hattie Gossett both offer new books on the subject of immigration to the USA.

In a two-color title that puts the "panic" in Hispanic, Geraldo Rivera sets the tone for his take on the situation. Predicated by a blow-out argument with Bill O'Reilly on the Fox show, The O'Reilly Factor, Rivera set out to get to the root of anti-Hispanic racism. He tells the tale of his own family's immigration from Puerto Rico, and of his stint giving legal assistance to the Young Lords, a radical community activist group of young Puerto Rican men in New York. He tells of his mother-in-law, Nancy Levy, a teacher in Cleveland Heights, and prints her letter to the Cleveland Jewish News on the occasion of the decision to close Coventry Elementary, which held for her memories of immigrant kids getting along back in the '50s.

But alas, there are many more tales of people not getting along. Rivera gets plenty of e-mail on the subject, giving him a pretty good view of the country's capacity for hatred - as much as one can from the haters who are motivated enough to shoot off nasty e-mail messages to Geraldo. A couple of highlights: "The first order of business is to secure our southern border by installing two parallel fences, 12 feet high and about 25 feet of separation, with land mines in between." And, writing about "illegal lawless Mexicans," another writer shifts into all caps to observe, "THIS IS HORRIFYING! THIS IS TEARING APART THE VERY FABRIC OF OUR ONCE VALIANT NATION!" These snapshots color and fill in around more public behavior by the likes of Tom Tancredo, the Republican congressman from Colorado who has opposed all immigration, legal and otherwise, and paints anyone with an opposing view as opening the door to terrorism.

The book is thoroughly researched and has the perspective of history, not only from Rivera's own family, but in stories of Cesar Chavez (who technically opposed illegal immigration, which Rivera explains was very different then from what is going on now) and other leaders. It's a little bit like immigration itself: huge with individual stories, which sometimes feel piled on indiscriminately. All in all, though, it is a sane and heartfelt look at what will be an enormous challenge and perhaps an opportunity for this country as the numbers continue to tilt.

HATTIE GOSSETT'S The Immigrant Suite: Hey Xenophobe: Who You Calling a Foreigner? ought to be, both linguistically and in its content, a habanero-hot collection of rants on the subject. The writer, spoken-word artist and activist, co-founding editor of Essence Magazine, and be-bop drummer whose words have been danced by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Urban Bush Women, does bring plenty of rhythm to her poems on immigrants and the fear of them. But that is their only real strength. The poems would be more compelling if they were overheard as casual outbursts on the street, one person's response to another's disrespect. But they are written on pages, and so, right or wrong, we expect more.

Whatever reportorial skills she may have, they are not in evidence here. Neither are the poetry skills that give the written word its staying power, the infusion of music with images and metaphors. Rather than explore either of those territories, Gossett presents rhetorical rants that hit all the familiar notes. In "What's In Your Suitcase? Are You White?" she says, "at the thomas jefferson plantation - can we go there - it was quite difficult to tell who was a slave and who wasnt because most everybody on the place in the fields and the big house looked just like massa tom especially - yes lets go there - the children."

In "radio talkback #1: the freedom fence," she assumes the voice of the radio: "We need the fence/so high they cant get over it/taller than the twin towers/we need the fence/so low they cant get under it/deeper than the deep blue sea." She then proceeds to wonder "why stop there?" and ask about fences between the US and Canada, and along the coasts, and about a safe-skies bubble dome "from sea to shining sea?/then will america finally be safe & free?"

In "speak english only/keep your mother tongue alive," a poem in two voices, she weighs one perspective against another in the tension immigrants face on one hand to speak only English and on another to keep their mother tongues alive: "if you wanna make it over here/you must speak english only/ in the civilized way" is balanced against "when you go home to visit/you must speak to your family in your mother tongue."

Gossett's is a confident voice full of attitude and rhythm, but she takes up an argument by repeating what anyone who might read this book has already heard.

HISPANIC, by Geraldo Rivera. Celebra, 2008, 272 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

THE IMMIGRANT SUITE: HEY XENOPHOBE, WHO YOU CALLING A FOREIGNER? By Hattie Gossett. Seven Stories Press, 2007, 144 pages, paper, $14.95.