RACINE - U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Monday night that immigration reform will require a step-by-step approach.

Ryan spoke to about 50 people at St. Patrick's Church, 1111 Douglas Ave., at a bilingual listening session geared toward the Hispanic community.

"I believe we have to do incremental reform for immigration laws if we want to get anything past Congress," Ryan said. "You're going to have to break it up into pieces."

Ed Salinas, 49, of Racine, asked Ryan how he would fight what Salinas called "the racism that's cloaked in patriotism," with groups who discriminate against Hispanics while saying they are defending America.

"The key is separating those people who are just bigots from everybody else," Ryan said.

Ryan said he would say that attitude carried a tinge of xenophobia, where people fear people from another country. Americans have been getting angry about immigration, Ryan said, for example in the case of illegal immigrant Ezequiel Lopez-Quintero, who was convicted of killing Kenosha County Sheriff's Deputy Frank Fabiano Jr.

"You see these things and it's creating so much anger in our communities," Ryan said. "The more we delay fixing this problem, the worse this is going to be."

He proposed focusing on border enforcement first, by providing legal border checkpoints and a guest worker program that would separate economic immigrants seeking jobs from what he called criminal immigrants. In an exchange with Yolanda Adams, the chief executive officer of the Urban League of Racine and Kenosha and the state director for the League of Latin American Citizens, Ryan said this was one of the best ways to police the border.

"To me it sounds like the shift has gone from the terrorist element to the unwanted Mexican immigrant," Adams said.

Next, Ryan said, a better worker verification system is needed. In many cases, Ryan said, illegal immigration amounts to identity theft. Seventeen million Social Security numbers are duplicates, and the documents needed to get a job are fairly easy to forge, he said.

"The current system is broken completely," Ryan said. "Nobody agrees that these laws work well."

As an alternative to the federal government's proposed E-Verify system, Ryan said he proposed a system for people to voluntarily get a secure ID with biographical and biometric information, which would connect the person's Social Security numbers to them using a verification number.

In addition to the issue of immigration itself, members of the audience asked how Ryan would help people after they come to the country with issues such as the housing crisis and affordable health care.

"Unless we face the people that are here, we're in trouble," said Ramona Delgado, 51, of Racine.

Ryan said people's confidence in their government is undermined when the law is not being followed, and the law needs to be reworked so it can be enforced. People should be able to immigrate legally and enter a system where everyone is taken care of, he said.

"You've got to start fixing the law so that it works," Ryan said.