MEXICO : Progress and Promise : Next Step : Border Towns Brace for Influx : * Free trade promises more explosive industrial growth. But whether it will slow the flow of U.S.-bound emigrants is unclear.

Miguel Angel Rodriguez, 18, recently left his job in a U.S.-owned furniture manufacturing plant here to strike out for his ultimate destination: New York, where relatives and, he hopes, better-paid work awaits.

“There’s no future for me here,” Rodriguez said as he stood by the rusted steel curtain that marks the border, eager to make his break north.

A few miles to the east, Irma Aragon, a mother of eight, said her job assembling radar components at another U.S. subsidiary--that nets her only $50 for a 48-hour week--has provided the bare minium needed to feed her family and fend off the temptation to flee. “I’m staying here,” said Aragon, 39, who has resisted entreaties to go to her in-laws’ home in Orange County.

The pair--both migrants from the interior of Mexico--represent disparate pieces of the migratory mosaic that shapes this and other fast-growing cities on Mexico’s northern border, an almost-2,000-mile-long arc that is expected to be a principal focus of enhanced development should negotiators conclude the proposed North American Free-Trade Agreement. The dynamic towns absorb new arrivals, severely straining an already-overtaxed infrastructure, and serve as staging platforms for those en route to the north.

While immigration issues are not part of the current free-trade agenda--no one is contemplating a European-like common market, featuring virtually unfettered transnational labor mobility--such concerns furnish a critical backdrop to the talks. The indefatigable flow of humanity--at its densest since Mexico plunged into a fiscal chasm a decade ago--is arguably the single most crucial economic, cultural and policy link between the two republics.

In the United States, lawmakers and others remain preoccupied with ceaseless unauthorized arrivals via the permeable border--although Mexico is also the largest source of legal immigrants. Anti-immigrant sentiment north of the border also often ignores the important contributions to U.S. prosperity of foreign-born labor.

In Mexico, the surge north has long been viewed ambivalently; it is a “safety valve” that diffuses widespread discontent, thus averting social chaos, and one of the nation’s economic lifelines, through remittances from abroad. Meantime, reports of mistreatment of expatriates in the United States continue to touch a deep-rooted nationalist nerve.

It is not surprising, then, that one of the principal--and most controversial--arguments postulated by free-trade proponents is a related one: That open markets will ultimately ease immigration pressures by generating decent-paying jobs in Mexico, thus obviating the need to venture north.

“We want to export products, not people,” Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has said repeatedly.

That, however, will be a herculean task for this debt-ridden nation, where 1 million new job-seekers enter the labor market each year and wages are one-eighth or less of U.S. salaries for comparable work. Mexican emigrants, long composed primarily of peasant men, increasingly include city-dwellers, women, children and members of Mexico’s ever-more-besieged middle and professional classes.

While almost everyone is in accord with Salinas’ proclaimed goal--eliminate the need to emigrate by bolstering domestic job prospects--the great debate is about how to go about it.

Indeed, some say the free-trade scheme, as now configured, could actually aggravate illicit immigration--just as unauthorized arrivals have mushroomed during recent years of unprecedented Mexican economic liberalization. It has been a dizzying time that has already dramatically transformed one of world’s most closed economies into one of its most open.

“Free trade alone might very well give impetus to the migration process instead of killing it,” Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a Mexican opposition leader, told a New York audience earlier this year.

Some analysts have voiced fears that small-plot corn-and-bean farmers--whose interests were at the core of the Mexican Revolution--may not be able to compete with a flood of imported foodstuffs mass-produced by U.S. agribusiness. They are early candidates to be buffeted by capital flows, perhaps to be funneled north. Workers at notoriously inefficient state-run enterprises may also be pulled into the U.S.-bound current.

But, said Wayne A. Cornelius, director of UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, who has championed Salinas’ far-reaching campaign of modernizacion , such losses could be offset in time by growth in U.S. demand for Mexican products, such as fresh fruit and vegetables.

As a kind of free-trade laboratory, observers look to Tijuana and other border cities, where, in recent years, U.S. companies have set up hundreds of export-oriented subsidiaries known as maquiladoras. The foreign firms, their existence jump-started a quarter-century ago by favorable trade concessions, went south in search of cheap and plentiful labor, access to U.S. markets, and relaxed environmental and worker-safety standards. The plants, which now generate about $4 billion annually in hard currency, making them Mexico’s second-largest cash earner after oil, serve as a kind of free-trade prototype, a prospective model of what is to come.

However, despite an aura of prosperity embodied in the gleaming new industrial parks that dot the landscape from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, the maquiladoras have clearly not stemmed the tide of illicit migration. Their history suggests that, economic integration or no, Mexico may continue exporting both products and people.

Some argue that the border industrial boom may have actually fueled the exodus, in two ways: By attracting impoverished migrants from the Mexican interior and, then, providing newcomers with sources of income sufficient to finance the last legs of their often-costly journeys.

“ Maquiladoras have become a jumping ground for immigration,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a Mexico City academic analyst close to the opposition Cardenas camp. Zinser is among those on Mexico’s political left who favor improved protections for expatriate Mexican laborers as part of any free-trade package.

Others contend that, if anything, emigration might have been even more pronounced without the maquiladora enterprise, which now employs about 500,000 Mexicans, mostly along the border area. Those opportunities filter would-be emigrants, advocates say.

“There is not a shred of scientifically reliable evidence that the maquiladoras, per se, have been a powerful magnet for migrants from the interior of Mexico, who subsequently slipped across the border to the United States,” Cornelius of UC San Diego stated in a study this year.

It is indisputable that the foreign-owned plants employ large numbers of dislocated people from Mexico, some of whom eventually opt to enter the United States. Others, like Irma Aragon, decide to stay.

“I had heard there were jobs for women here,” said Aragon, who arrived from Guadalajara with her family six years ago.

Indeed, most maquiladora laborers are young women, a fact that executives trace to what they call women’s superior manual dexterity. Still, turnover routinely exceeds 100% a year, something that workers attribute to low pay, the lure of better jobs across the border, and often-rigorous working conditions, which frequently include production speed-ups, monotonous repetition of tasks, and exposure to glues, solvents and other toxic ingredients.

Despite such hardships, the factories have provided many with a living, however threadbare. “I may go to the north to visit sometime, but I’m staying here to live,” said Aragon, showing a visitor her well-tended but cramped home. It is a wood-frame structure situated in a ragged, outlying district. It lacks electricity, running water, sewage service, transportation and paved streets--typical for the bursting shantytowns and frayed developments that ring the often-cavernous factories.

Each weekday, Aragon leaves home about 6 a.m. for the 45-minute walk to begin her 10-hour shift on the assembly line.

For some, it’s not worth it. Miguel Angel Rodriguez, a native of the central state of Morelos, said the month he spent assembling furniture for a U.S.-owned concern here was solely designed to generate cash for the voyage to New York. “I had no intention of staying there: the work is very hard and the pay is a pittance,” said Rodriguez, anxious to get on with his journey.

The Times Poll

MEXICO Mexicans’ opinion of the U.S.:

Good: 65%

Bad: 14%

Very bad: 2%

Don’t know: 12%

Very Good: 7%

The Times Poll: Views on the United States

MEXICO What do you like about the United States?

(Most often mentioned responses)

Economic opportunities: 22%

Nothing in particular: 13%

A rich country: 12%

Democracy: 11%

Culture: 9%

Public services: 8%

Products: 8%

Government protects people: 7%

What do you dislike about the United States?

(Most often mentioned responses)

Racial discrimination: 23%

Drugs and crime: 19%

Nothing in particular: 17%

Superior attitude: 12%

Government dominates other countries: 11%

Cold / unfriendly people: 8%

Warlike: 8% SOURCE: Los Angeles Times Poll

* ABOUT THIS SECTION

The principal writers for this special report on Mexico were Marjorie Miller and Juanita Darling of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau, and Richard Boudreaux of The Times’ Managua Bureau. Don Bartletti, of The Times’ San Diego Edition, took the photographs.