Influx of North Africans Arouses Doubts for France’s Melting Pot : Immigration: Wrenching questions about xenophobia, racism, citizenship, assimilation and national identity come to surface.

After simmering for decades, France’s melting pot has boiled over. The reasons:

In a suburb of Paris, police clash with the alienated children of North African immigrants, leaving two youths and a policewoman dead.

* Three Muslim girls create a national stir by seeking to cover their heads with scarves at school, in accordance with Islamic tradition.

* Polls show that a majority of French citizens believe there are too many non-European immigrants living in France.

* A right-wing politician feeds on these fears by making “France for the French” his party’s motto.

Immigration has become a dominant issue in France, raising fundamental, wrenching questions about xenophobia, racism, citizenship, assimilation and, ultimately, national identity.

It is, in the opinion of former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, the most important source of conflict in the nation.

The issue takes on special significance in France, which prides itself on being a nation that has welcomed refugees and other foreigners and has assimilated them into a single society, in keeping with the French Revolution’s ideals of brotherhood and human rights.

In fact, the welcome has not always been that warm. French immigration and naturalization laws have wavered over the years to embrace newcomers when they were needed as soldiers or workers, but discourage them when national priorities changed and xenophobia took over. In recent years, anti-foreign sentiment has been on the rise, as France has struggled to determine who is French and just what being French means.

According to the 1990 census, France has more than 3.6 million legal immigrants, about 6.5% of its 56 million population. But that figure does not include about 1.3 million immigrants with French identity cards and perhaps another million who are there illegally.

It is not the number of foreigners that has created the current crisis, however. It is their origin. France’s earlier waves of immigrants came primarily from European nations such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Poland. In the last three decades, the source has shifted to the Maghreb, the section of northwest Africa that contains France’s former colonies of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

North Africans began heading for France after Algeria gained its independence in 1962. The migration swelled during the next decade, when France and the rest of Europe readily accepted low-wage laborers to fuel industrial expansion.

When the Arab oil embargo slowed growth in 1973-74, France officially closed its doors to immigrants--but not all the way. While encouraging the million or so Maghrebis who were in the country to go home, the government gave them the option of remaining and even bringing their families to join them. Ninety percent elected to stay.

Today an estimated 3.3 million people of North African descent live in France. About 1.5 million are legal immigrants who remain citizens of their native countries. An equal number are their sons and daughters, known as Beurs , who automatically obtain French citizenship by being born in France, and other nationalized Maghrebis. The remaining 300,000 are illegal aliens.

While the Europeans who migrated earlier have become integrated and accepted into French society, most Arabs have not. Segregated when they first arrived, they continue to live mainly in ghettos in and around Paris, Marseilles and other large cities. They are the focus of the immigrant-bashing that has rocked and shocked France.

A government poll last June found that 71% of the French think their country has too many Arabs, and 42% admit to feeling hostile toward them. Nearly everyone surveyed said he believes that racism has become rampant in France.

With unemployment running between 9% and 10%, the public is looking for scapegoats. The right-wing National Front party has taken direct aim at foreigners in its “France First” campaign.

More significant in the long run, suggest those familiar with the situation, are deep-rooted fears that France might be overwhelmed by foreigners of different religion, color and custom.

A Parisian woman in her 70s said that “there’s not enough wine in the glass” and her benefits are in danger because the government is spending so much to help immigrants.

A byproduct of the immigration dilemma is a kind of national schizophrenia that leaves individuals and institutions torn by contradictory feelings.

The challenge of determining who and what a Frenchman really is, of reconciling 18th-Century revolutionary ideals with 20th-Century realities, was succinctly portrayed on the cover of the newspaper Le Figaro’s Sunday-supplement magazine.

The illustration showed Marianne, the symbol of France. She was draped in the French tricolor. And she wore an Arab woman’s veil.