SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : An Overview : A Global Pursuit of Happiness : Millions are leaving their homelands to seek a better life. The mass migration has brought costly, complex dilemmas. It could imperil stability in some countries.

A woman gynecologist from Romania sells bananas in a downtown supermarket here. Polish engineers pick grapes in Swiss alpine vineyards, earning in five weeks what it would take them five months to make at home. Thai bar girls in Tokyo ride the Japanese economic boom together with 700,000 workers from Korea. Expatriates from more than 100 countries work in graying Italy, where Roman matrons connive with Borgian resolve for the services of Filipina cleaning women.

Among the 2.8 million foreign workers displaced by trauma in the Middle East last year were 17,000 Vietnamese. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians harvest rubber and copra in Malaysia for the same pocketbook reasons that Mexicans pump gasoline in Los Angeles. In Germany, there are more than 1,000 mosques for resident Turkish workers.

Poor people began voting with their feet for a better way of life before there was a history to record their passage. Now, in the waning days of the 20th Century, the accelerating flight of huddled masses yearning to breathe prosperous air is muscling its way toward the top of the international agenda.

At least 40 million people, and perhaps twice that many, live as expatriates today, most for bread-and-butter reasons. Counting them is difficult. But, by the most conservative estimate, globe-trotting workers feed 100 million of their kinfolk back home, including millions who are unable to support themselves.

Around the world, cross-border migration of job-thirsty workers is growing rapidly, to the pleasure of a few countries--and the dismay of most. The migrants come mostly from two social poles: at one end, the poor and unskilled, and at another, in a brain drain, the better-educated citizens of developing societies who seek economic and intellectual fulfillment unavailable at home.

The accelerating flow is the product of desperation and ambition fueled by political and economic upheaval in many places--and by newfound freedom in a few. In addition to a well-established South-North movement of workers, the collapse of communism has unleashed a growing East-West traffic as well.

As international migration becomes more diffuse, it also becomes more difficult to control, swamping outmoded laws and old-fashioned policies. As a global issue, it already poses costly and vexing dilemmas for dozens of countries and is increasingly the focus of learn-as-you-go international conferences. One such opened at the Vatican on Monday.

By century’s end, migration will not only color political decisions but may also seriously jeopardize national stability of both sending and receiving countries on every continent, according to experts here in the historic home of major international agencies concerned with the dreams and the plight of migrants.

“Migratory pressures will pose unprecedented political, social and economic problems for governments in both South and North. Uncontrolled mass migration could threaten social cohesion, international solidarity and peace,” said Jonas Widgren, a former Swedish government official and migration policy specialist now attached to the headquarters here of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees.

In migrant-buffeted Western Europe, there is already a strong, ugly backlash. Neo-Nazis march in Germany vowing to “clean up . . . the leftists, faggots, foreigners.” An anti-immigrant political movement in Italy wants to split the country into three separate republics, reserving the rich industrial north for northerners.

Countries that export labor are also suffering. In Jordan, social services are swamped by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who returned there after losing jobs in Persian Gulf countries. Poor man’s Yemen must cope with 800,000 workers expelled from Saudi Arabia after the Yemeni government incautiously supported Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The offshore Yemenis had generated about 60% of their country’s annual foreign currency earnings.

In 1989, before the Persian Gulf crisis rewrote the rules for imported labor in the Middle East, data of the International Monetary Fund show that overseas workers sent $32.2 billion back to developing countries and another $5.2 billion to more advanced countries such as Portugal, Spain and Italy. Nobody knows how many billions evade official scrutiny, but the capital exported home by these international migrants is an integral part of the global economy.

Suppose each worker managed to get $1,000 a year back to his family at home. In America, $1,000 represents a new family video camera. In most of Africa, it exceeds the combined income of five men working one year.

With so much at stake, more migrant-related trauma is inevitable, experts say, as workers in teeming have-not societies jostle for a piece of the rich northern pie. In the remotest African village today, the brightest young people know that a better life is only a short airplane ride north.

“My own impression is that ‘Dallas’ has attracted more people to the North than it ever wanted. Poor people who see all that wealth and glitter are bound to want a morsel or two themselves,” said W. Roger Bohning, a migrant expert here at the International Labor Office, a specialized agency of the United Nations.

Bohning counts some 20 million workers who enjoy some sort of legal standing in a country other than their own. On average, they support three family members, meaning that at least 100 million people benefit from international migration.

Beyond those officially registered, the numbers get murky. Estimates abound. At least 5 million people, Bohning guesses conservatively, are illegal workers, tolerated or hunted by countries where they live and work without permission or documentation. At the high end of the estimates, the World Council of Churches here thinks there may be as many as 30 million illegal expatriate workers in the world today.

Reginald Appleyard, a migration specialist at the University of Western Australia now in residence at the International Organization for Migration here, cautions that counting those who work abroad is not only difficult but also can be deceptive.

“If the United States and other industrial countries don’t know for sure how many illegals they have, what chance is there for Africa or Latin America?” Appleyard asked. “In every country there are illegals whom the government looks on with a blind eye because they are needed. Being illegal really means that the government condones and tolerates the presence of foreign workers but doesn’t wish to give them status.”

Illegals go from Dublin to Boston or Dakar to Paris or Hong Kong to Vancouver on visas as tourists or students, then vanish from official view to work where they can. They arrive in Sicily by ferry from Tunisia and by small boat from Morocco to the Spanish coast in the dead of night. They wade the Rio Grande.

It was ever thus. Today’s flows, noted Doris Meissner, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, are a pale echo of the 19th-Century emptying of Europe, when 20% of the people left for North and South America and Australia. Still, the underlying principle is the same: “Migration is intrinsic to the process of economic development,” Meissner says.

World War II and the subsequent death of colonialism were marked by more great migrations, movements that lasted through the 1950s, noted the ILO’s Bohning. In the ‘60s, both traditional receiver countries, such as the United States, and the rapidly growing West European nations accepted large numbers of foreign workers.

“The oil crisis in the ‘70s stopped immigration in Western Europe but triggered major flows to Arab oil countries, Nigeria and Venezuela,” he noted. The ‘80s brought an uncertain decade as oil prices fell, but for the first time large numbers of single women, mostly Sri Lankans and Filipinas, joined the international search for jobs.

Thus far in the ‘90s, said Bohning, Southeast Asia and East Asia are major growth poles for migration. The United States is also accepting greater numbers of immigrants--600,000 this year, plus another 10,000 coveted “green cards” to wealthy foreigners willing to invest $1 million and create at least 10 jobs. Western Europe, meanwhile, writhes from great migrant pressure from both South and East for the first time.

Legal migrants, sometimes called contract workers, are employed to do a specific job for a fixed period. They usually try to stay when the contract runs out. Often they are exploited by employers. Almost invariably, however, they are better off economically than they were in homelands they fled.

Germany stopped importing Turkish “guest workers” in the 1970s, but there are still 1.5 million Turks in Germany. Black Forest-style chalets dot the plains of Anatolia in testimony to their industriousness, but nowadays Germany’s most prosperous Turks invest in Germany.

The international migrant stream overwhelmingly moves from poorer to richer countries, usually South to North. Of the 25 million that Bohning counts, there are 6 million in the United States and Canada today, another 6 million in Europe, 3 million in Africa, 3 million in Latin America and 1 million in Asia and Oceania. There were 6 million in the Gulf before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but the Middle East labor markets have been in flux ever since.

Migrant workers are only part of the international flow of peoples. There are an estimated 15 million refugees in the world today living outside their countries: about 5 million of them Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, and another 5 million Africans displaced by war or famine.

Africa is a particularly vexing continent on which to count people, since national boundaries of newly independent countries often cut across ancient, more important tribal boundaries. There are more foreigners in Gabon today than Gabonese.

ILO researcher Sergio Ricca estimates that about 35 million Africans, about 10% of the continent’s population, live at some stage of their lives in countries other than their own. In South Africa alone, there may be 1 million undocumented workers.

In addition to those who forthrightly, if sometimes illegally, travel to find work, some 550,000 foreigners applied last year for political asylum in industrialized countries, which spent a sapping $7 billion to process and support them, according to Cengiz Aktar at the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees.

“About 80% of the asylum requests are found to be bogus. Most are migrating not for political reasons, but in search of a better way of life,” said Aktar. Some, like Albanians hustled directly home from Italy, get short shrift. Others, like Poles taking advantage of Spain’s creaky bureaucracy, are paid both by the government and underground employers while they wait for their asylum requests to be rejected.

When Switzerland inevitably rejects her request for asylum, Geneva’s banana-selling gynecologist can easily drift across into France and apply there; buying more time in which to make more money.

What alarms most experts is that the international pool of would-be migrants is growing exponentially. The number of receiving countries, never more than a handful, is not.

Remember the population bomb? It is still ticking--more loudly than ever. Moreover, the United Nations estimates that 95% of population growth over the next 35 years will be in developing countries.

Of the 5.3 billion people on Earth, 80% live in poor countries. That is uncounted millions more than there are jobs. Example: Turkey has been booming for the last decade, and is applying for membership in the European Community. But its per capita income is still only one-tenth of Germany’s. One-third of the young men in Turkish villages told a recent academic interviewer that they would emigrate if they could.

Everybody, computer programmers to hardscrabble peasants, intuitively understands that there is no chance that the poor South can generate enough jobs for all of its children in the decades to come. Example: Oil-rich Nigeria, which imported foreign workers in the boom ‘70s, deported 1 million foreigners in 1983-84. At present rates, Nigeria’s population will swell from a current 113 million to 228 million in 2010, and 30 years later, to 340 million. That, in one African country, is as many people as live today in all 12 nations of the European Community.

In Venezuela and the Gulf oil states, the market for migrants is also depressed. Hapless Argentina, which used to welcome large numbers of immigrants, is exporting its own skilled people--a million have left in the past decade. Israel happily welcomes Jewish immigrants, whether they are Soviet or Ethiopian, but the migration and political unrest combines to reduce the number of jobs that have been filled by Arab workers in Israel.

Which leaves the old standbys--the United States, Canada and Australia--as the three most welcoming sanctuaries for permanent migration. Of about 1 million who will legally migrate as settlers this year, some 60% will go to the United States, 20% to Canada and about 10% to Australia.

About 80% of those bound for the United States have been going as part of family unification programs, and nearly three-quarters of them will become citizens and stay for good. But with a change in the U.S. immigration laws effective today, it will join Canada and Australia in admitting more immigrants on the basis of their age, education and skills.

For all its selectivity, Australia still gets 10 applications for every one that is accepted, Appleyard noted.

“Migrants are driven by political, economic and demographic realities, particularly if the countries are of uncertain politics, low economic growth and high demographic growth,” said Appleyard.

Typically, migrants move first within their own nation, from the countryside to the cities. The numbers are staggering: between 300 and 400 million internal migrants in the developing world in the 1980s alone, by Bohning’s estimate.

Third World mega-cities fulfill some hopes, but not everybody’s. What they do offer virtually everyone, though, is a televised glimpse of a rich outside world often only dimly perceived from the countryside.

Thus, it is from the Third World capitals that the most desperate--as well as the best and the brightest--leap abroad, often on cut-rate airlines whose gate agents are not visa-fussy. Until the present unrest in Yugoslavia, one classic route to Europe for Filipinas was a cheap Manila-Zagreb flight, and from there by train to just before the Italian border. After that, a short walk and a little luck could mean a relative dolce vita.

One Filipina in Rome who earned $40 a month as a high school biology teacher in Manila now makes $10 an hour cleaning apartments in Rome.

Migrants encounter resentment and racism as members of newly arrived minorities in most countries, but they also help create new social textures.

The Algerian office worker in Paris, the Pakistani laundress in London, the Tunisian entrepreneur in Rome have all become as familiar a part of a new Europe as high-speed trains and dreams of continental integration. Europeans in fact are just catching up: Most Americans would find home a duller place without the contributions of immigrants, whether it be music or food, sports or scientific discoveries.

Appleyard and others foresee no major changes in the immigration policies of the industrialized countries for the rest of this century, although some of them will require more labor than they can produce themselves, either as a result of rapid growth or of the aging of their populations.

“Even in the best possible scenario, it is difficult to envision that the frontiers of the Northern countries would be kept wide open for masses of Southern migrants. At the same time, there are enough indications that a highly restrictive Northern migration policy, which relies mostly on mechanisms of administrative control, will be unable to cope with the migratory pressure from the South,” said James N. Purcell Jr., director general of the International Organization for Migration here.

Or the East either, he might have added. Germany’s large-scale, east-west internal migration is echoed by the westward movement of workers from other former Soviet Bloc countries. At any given time, 2% of Poland’s work force is in Germany on short-term jobs or as traders, by one estimate. Some 80,000 Romanians applied for political asylum in the West last year. Albanians hijacking rust buckets to Italy are Europe’s counterpart to Cuba’s inner-tube refugees. Yugoslavs leave their disintegrating country in a steady stream even without violence to encourage them.

With unemployment soaring in Eastern European countries whose economies are being painfully overhauled, the pressure to head West builds daily. And, in January, 1993, when the European Community promises to open internal borders between its members, foreign travel coincidentally becomes a legal right--rather than a privilege--for Soviet citizens for the first time.

The prospect, then, must be for a big jump in the number of illegal migrants, not only in twice-squeezed Western Europe but also in the United States and the boom countries of Asia.

In the next 35 years, the population of Latin America will double to 760 million, Widgren notes. That can only translate into continued relentless pressure on southern U.S. borders.

In Asia, Japan is a major pole of attraction for migrants. If Japanese don’t like to do dirty work, there are plentiful numbers of Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Thais happy to do it for them. There are already about 100,000 legal migrants in Japan and perhaps twice that many illegals, and the trend is sharply up. Appleyard cites one estimate that there will be 2.7 million more jobs in Japan than Japanese workers by century’s end.

“The Japanese are very worried. They don’t want to let in non-Japanese who will stay,” Bohning said. Recruiters from Tokyo are trying to woo “home” second- and third-generation Japanese-Brazilians.

Workers in considerable numbers are also expected to continue flocking to booming countries like Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea. And what would happen to Asian labor markets if China’s billion won the right of free travel?

Even without them, most of Asia’s foreign workers will be other Asians as the next century begins. There will be Asians, as well, throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

There are already tens of thousands of Filipinas--the world’s most footloose women--working around the world, particularly as domestics in Europe and the Middle East. Filipinas are widely prized for their industry and competence, but in some European capitals they now encounter competition from Poles, who work cheaper.

Ways to cope with the coming waves of migrants range from high fences at the Hong Kong border and along the Rio Grande to West Europe’s search for a common visa policy that one British newspaper called “a fortress of regulations to keep the unwanted poor beyond its borders.”

The savage irony, of course, is that the migrants’ targets are industrial democracies wed not only to prosperity but also to the widest possible respect for human rights. Is it possible to have a closed open society? Europeans, like Americans, wonder.

The Italian government is still writhing at the furious national outcry against its ham-handed deportation of 20,000 Albanians who sailed across the Adriatic looking for work during the summer. In response, Italy has pledged $120 million in emergency economic aid to Albania and has sent 700 unarmed soldiers there to help distribute it.

Indeed, Purcell and other experts argue that the most effective way to deal with international migratory pressures is to deflect them by diminishing the gap between the few rich and the many poor. Economic assistance that generates work which convinces people that it is worthwhile staying home is preferable to higher fences, they say.

There is some hope that new computer and communications technology will fundamentally alter the international distribution of labor by allowing multinational corporations to move an increasing volume of operations offshore.

“Governments naturally turn first to law enforcement, but it cannot be really effective,” said the Carnegie’s Meissner, a former acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “What is really at issue is the economic and political systems in countries that people are leaving. For all of the Cold War, we talked about peoples’ rights to leave oppressive countries. Now we should be talking about the right of people to stay in their own countries with the prospect of decent lives there.”

Sometimes politicians come to conferences like the one under way at the Vatican. They nod sagely at calls for more help to the world’s have-not majority in the name of enlightened self-interest. But like everybody else, they understand that more foreign aid will not win the vote of a downtown merchant in Florence angry at Senegalese migrants selling trinkets on the sidewalk outside his shop.

Like America’s war against cocaine and Italy’s against the Mafia, the quickening international search for ways to turn off the migrant spigot has a losing look. Like it or not, rich countries may have to reconcile themselves to unabating migration and the stressful changes it brings to national social fabrics. It is the price of being wealthy in a world still full of poverty.