CLINTON, CONGRESS SQUARE OFF OVER IMMIGRATION BILL.

Byline: Eric Schmitt The New York Times

As House and Senate negotiators prepare to iron out the last details of a bill whose chief target is illegal immigration, a battle with the White House is looming over provisions that would drastically restrict public assistance to legal immigrants.

The bill would also do more to hold immigrants' sponsors financially responsible for them.

Supporters say the legislation would slash the number of immigrants using government programs such as prenatal care, Medicaid and supplemental security income, and would make public assistance less of an attraction for coming to the United States.

``The American people want people to come to work,'' said Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. ``They do not want people to come to go on welfare.''

Indeed, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said last week that 25 percent of elderly supplemental security income recipients were legal immigrants.

Critics say the legislation takes a reasonable approach too far by effectively cutting off taxpaying immigrants from the very types of programs - child care, job training, English classes and college loans - that enable them to stay off welfare and increase their chances of success in the United States.

``Latinos with green cards are able to move out of poverty into a higher standard of living, but they can't do it if they can't learn English, if their babies aren't born healthy, if they can't join job-training programs and if they can't go to college,'' said Lori M. Kaplan, executive director of the Latin American Youth Center, an agency here that serves 5,000 mostly Latino and Vietnamese youths and their families.

Republicans and Democrats have been competing this year to be seen as being tough on illegal immigration, and the current bills would nearly double the size of the Border Patrol, increase penalties for smuggling aliens and restrict asylum. But divisions in the Republican Party caused several broader proposals for limiting legal immigration to be dropped from the legislation, and many Democrats oppose the limits on public assistance that remain.

House and Senate negotiators are set to begin working out differences in their two bills. President Clinton said earlier this month that the Senate bill in particular ``goes too far in denying legal immigrants access to vital safety-net programs.'' The president has raised the possibility of a veto, although his strongest objection has been to a proposal in the House bill involving public education for illegal immigrants.

Doris M. Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the legislation's proposals on legal immigrants were problematic.