SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : The Political Fallout : France Is the Immigration Litmus Test : The issue has emerged as a central, volatile theme in many European countries. But the French are drawing up battle lines.

Speaking at a dinner in Orleans last summer, former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac shocked the French political Establishment with surprisingly strong--some commentators said racist--remarks about a predominantly Arab immigrant neighborhood in Paris. Historians may someday mark it as the moment that immigration became a dominant theme in late 20th-Century French politics.

Chirac, powerful mayor of Paris and heir to the political movement created by the late Charles de Gaulle, is an opposition leader and perpetual candidate for the French presidency from the moderate right. At the dinner in the town where Joan of Arc was born, he rose to defend what he described as struggling French working people surrounded by welfare-dependent North African Muslims in the Goutte-d’Or neighborhood on the north side of Paris.

“When a Frenchman,” he said, “who lives in the Goutte-d’Or and who works with his wife to earn 15,000 francs ($2,500) a month, sees a family crowded into the apartment across the hall consisting of a father, three or four wives and a score of kids drawing 50,000 francs ($8,300) in social welfare payments--not to mention the racket and the smells--it just burns him up.”

Chirac went on to blast the immigration policy of the ruling Socialist Party under President Francois Mitterrand, charging that it had caused an “overdose” of immigrants. But what most people remembered, and what the political cartoonists jumped to caricature, was that a prominent French leader said that Arab immigrants had different smells than French people.

After years as a side issue in political campaigns, immigration has emerged as a central, volatile theme in many Western European countries.

In Germany and Austria (where the anti-immigrant Freedom Party made a strong showing in last year’s parliamentary elections), the public concern is about waves of Eastern Europeans seeking asylum and economic opportunity in the West.

“I consider the increasing flood of asylum seekers the most important domestic issue next to monetary stability,” German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said during a recent television interview. This year alone, an estimated 200,000 people--mainly from formerly Communist Eastern Europe--are expected to ask for asylum in Germany, according to Interior Ministry officials.

In Britain, immigration from the former British imperial raj territories of South Asia has become an issue that could figure in campaigns when Prime Minister John Major decides to call parliamentary elections. Former Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit caused a stir last year when he proposed a “cricket test” to measure the loyalty of immigrants: Do they root for the British side or their native lands at the grounds.

But nowhere is the emergence of immigration as a political theme more developed than in France, where the extreme-right National Front has used its anti-immigrant message to build a solid base of between 15% and 20% in the national electorate.

A Figaro magazine poll late last month revealed that 52% of the French are opposed to any new immigration to their country, despite its long history as a nation of asylum for political and economic refugees. In the same poll, 77% of the French said that the million-plus illegal aliens in the country should all be expelled.

The significance of Chirac’s remarks, which sparked furious debate throughout France, was not so much in the words; National Front Party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has been using similar language for years. The difference this time was that the anti-immigrant polemic was coming from a mainstream French politician, two-time prime minister and mayor of France’s most important city.

Since then it has become fashionable for prominent politicians of all stripes to join in the immigrant bashing.

Socialist Prime Minister Edith Cresson raised the idea of hiring charter aircraft to transport thousands of illegal aliens, mostly from French-speaking Africa, back to their homelands. Cresson has intensified immigration controls at airports and added transit visa requirements for residents of certain countries with high rates of illegal emigration. In recent weeks, aircraft arriving from foreign countries have been met by immigration officials waiting on the Tarmac who screen passports to separate “problem” nationalities from other passengers.

Former right-wing government minister Michel Poniatowski compared the immigrants, most of whom come from former French colonial territories, to the Nazi occupation during World War II. Outdoing even Le Pen, he advocates reviewing all marriages between French nationals and immigrants since 1988 to make certain they were not marriages of convenience aimed at fraudulently securing citizenship.

In the latest episode, former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing--still a leading force in the national political arena--described immigration as an “invasion” and called for a national referendum to establish a new code of nationality for the French. Giscard d’Estaing, like Le Pen before him, called for a “zero quota” on new immigrants.

Under his plan, the nation that has welcomed political and economic refugees since the French Revolution would cease to be an “immigrant country.” Picking up on Chirac’s comments about Goutte-d’Or’s Arab immigrants with several wives, Giscard d’Estaing said citizenship rights should be granted only to monogamous relationships.

In fact, most of the solutions to the immigration problem proposed by politicians of the right and left are nearly identical to those proposed earlier by Le Pen, including expulsion of illegal aliens, elimination of automatic French citizenship for children born in France of foreign parents and severe penalties for businesses caught employing illegal immigrants.

The main difference is that Le Pen also advocates giving preference in hiring to French citizens. To increase the number of indigenous French people, Le Pen also advocates increasing allowances paid to French mothers with several children.

In the Figaro poll, Le Pen--whose xenophobic party motto is “France for the French”--came out far ahead of 13 rivals in response to the question of which French politician has the best position on immigration. He was picked by 22%, compared to only 10% who picked Mitterrand. Significantly, the demagogic right-wing leader, who has also expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, got his strongest support from the youngest respondents--voters 18 to 24 years old. According to Gilles Kepel, a specialist on North African immigration at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences, this represents a recent radical rightward shift on this extremely sensitive issue.

“Today,” Kepel said in a recent interview, “the right has adopted the language of the extreme right. The left has adopted the language of the right. Everyone is realigning and rallying around the platform of Le Pen--to such an extent that he doesn’t even have to hold meetings anymore.”

“Immigration,” agreed Annie Kriegel, professor of political sociology at the University of Nanterre, “is no longer a subject that only feeds the extreme right. It has become a national problem.”

That is not to say that all French politicians or institutions have adopted an anti-immigrant stand. Influential French civil rights organizations such as S.O.S. Racisme and France Plus work hard to put a positive light on the contributions of immigrants, harking back to the famous Swiss Guard mercenaries who played a key role in the 1789 French Revolution.

During the height of this summer’s immigration debate, a leading French state economics research institution, INSEE, released a report arguing that because of the declining birthrate among indigenous French families, the country would need more immigrants by the year 2000 to meet the demands of its workplaces. The report was dismissed by right-wing critics as propaganda for the ruling Socialist Pary.

In fact, the question of just how many immigrants there are in France is the subject of bitter debate.

Officially, there are no more immigrants in France than 10 years ago or, indeed, 50 years ago--about 3.7 million out of a population of 55 million. However, the official numbers are widely disputed, and the Figaro poll indicated that 75% of the French don’t believe their own government on this subject.

Population experts argue that the 3.7 million does not include immigrants with French identity cards (1.3 million), children of immigrants (3.3 million) or second-generation immigrants (6 million). According to Figaro, there are “14 million people of foreign origin living in France--one-quarter of the total population of the country.” And even these numbers do not include the large number (estimates range between 500,000 and 2 million) of illegal immigrants living and working in France.

But much more important than the number of immigrants is the origin of the immigrants. In 1975, according to the French Ministry of Social Affairs, the great majority (84.2%) of immigrants acquiring French nationality were European, mainly from Italy, Spain and Portugal--then the poor sisters of the Western European community. That year, only 9.8% of the new French citizens came from Africa.

By 1989, however, only 37.5% of the new French citizens were from other European countries, while the number of immigrants from Africa had jumped to 35%.

Most of the African immigrants are Muslim. Many speak Arabic and show little inclination to join in French culture. In recent years, Islam has replaced Protestant Christianity as the second-largest religious grouping (behind Roman Catholicism) in France. Also, an estimated 90% of the illegal alien population in France comes from Muslim North Africa.

Comfortable with their fellow European immigrants, who either lost their former national identity or went back home after they made money in France, the French find themselves uneasy in the presence of a rival culture on their own territory.

There are several other apparent reasons for fears and concerns about immigration in the French population.

For one thing, the immigrants are seen as a drain on the struggling French economy. The National Front party has successfully exploited the fact that the official number of immigrants in the country is about the same as the number of unemployed workers.

Additionally, with the 12-nation European Economic Community set to create a “borderless Europe” in 1993--where immigration and customs stations between member states are supposed to be removed to promote free trade and traffic in goods--the culture-proud French were already feeling threatened and overly dependent on others to protect their borders.

“France can’t do much about illegal immigration by itself,” noted magazine and newspaper columnist Alain Duhamel in an interview, “because the clandestine immigrants enter France through other countries. We have to have a common policy. Spain and Italy have to become the gendarmes for France, they are the ones who must do the police work.”

In a Europe without borders, the immigration policy of the 12 nations is only as strong as its weakest link, since that is the country that immigrants would naturally choose in order to penetrate the Continent. The Treaty of Schengen, signed in the Luxembourg city of the same name in 1985, sets the general terms for a common immigration policy. However, officials of the European countries are still involved in intense discussions to come up with a standard policy of visas for non-European Community visitors and would-be immigrants.

A key regional election in the Alps-Maritime region of France next spring, pitting Le Pen against self-made millionaire and soccer baron Bernard Tapie, an independent who generally backs the Socialists, is likely to be the first vote in which immigration will play a critical role.

But the big showdown will come in the 1993 spring parliamentary elections that have the potential of forcing 74-year-old President Mitterrand into an early retirement before his seven-year term expires in 1995.

Political friends of the president say he has vowed not to undergo another humiliating period of “cohabitation,” as he did with Chirac (1986-88), in which he serves as Socialist head of state with a right-wing prime minister and government.

Also contributing to this story were editorial assistant Sarah White in Paris, Times staff writer William Tuohy in London and researcher Jeff Hurd in Berlin.