PERSPECTIVE ON IMMIGRATION : What’s Necessary Should Be Legal : Americans won’t give up their ‘help’ and the border can’t be sealed, so stop the sham of tolerated illegality.

In the most unexpected and tragicomic way, immigration without papers, rights or status has returned to the center stage of American politics. The Clinton Administration’s problems with nannies and nominees has shifted an errant spotlight onto an issue generally ignored in Middle America: the mass presence of undocumented immigrants in its midst. It is, in fact, one of the central problems facing the United States as a whole, not just California, Texas and the barrios of Chicago.

Every study concurs. The latest, which the Commission on Agricultural Workers will submit to Congress next week, states that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act did not resolve the “problem.” Undocumented immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean has not stopped. It has grown dramatically over the past five years, and will continue to so. It has become far more diverse geographically, originating in countries where it never occurred previously, and in its economic, gender and social composition--now often urban, literate, lower middle-class and, increasingly, female. It has extended into areas of the United States heretofore untouched by the trend, from New York, where Mexicans, for example, had never dared to venture, to Seattle, from North Carolina to New Haven. And it has penetrated areas of the U.S. job market that until a decade ago were largely unknown to men and women from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru: domestic work, restaurants and parking lots.

As U.S. society changes--as women join the work force, and as more of the middle class has money for what used to be luxuries--and as the restructuring of the American economy goes forward, new needs arise. So do new ways of satisfying them: help at home with the laundry and the lawn, fast-food employees willing to flip hamburgers for pennies, a human touch to care for the very young and the elderly. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Peruvians and Colombians (among others) will do it, kindly and efficiently. And Americans who employ them are ever grateful for their presence and their cost; what would life be without them?

As anyone who has witnessed how the old and new migration networks operate throughout Latin America will affirm, the chances are slim for any significant let-up in the flow over the next decade. The silver-bullet theory of immigration control, free trade and more Border Patrol agents, will prove to be as irrelevant as all the earlier quick fixes proved to be. The lack of opportunities south of the Rio Grande and the abundance of “high-paying” jobs in the United States, which is what $4.75 an hour sweeping factory floors or $15 an hour doing housework represents for millions of Latin Americans, ensure that the flow of people north will persist. The communications revolution, domestic and international--from CNN to bargain air travel--ensures that. And the job networks and contacts that each newcomer finds make it likely that those who try to follow will succeed.

No country, if given the choice, would prefer to allow mass, illegal immigration rather than staunch it. Being a country where a unified, accepted and even glorified rule of law plays a key role in bringing cohesion to a perennially fragmented society, the United States in particular would obviously hope to frame its options neatly: allow and legalize the immigration it needs, and nothing more than that; stop the rest.

To choose between allowing illegal immigration and banning it is not exactly a difficult task. It is, unfortunately for the democratic fabric of this nation, an impossible one. The choice is not between an easy course and an unacceptable one, but rather between two pernicious possibilities: accepting mass immigration legally because it is inevitable, necessary and highly desirable, or doing the same illegally because the country cannot face the facts of what it is doing. This dichotomy is a tougher one to swallow, but it is the one that must be dealt with.

There is such a strong case against undocumented immigration that the one in favor of legalization seems hardly worth arguing. But keeping the process in the twilight zone of tolerated illegality is the worst of all possible worlds: It makes criminals of all those who hire undocumented foreigners, and of the foreigners themselves. It forces wages down, strips millions of individuals of the rights and dignity that most Americans take, quite rightly, for granted, and creates a huge “black hole” in American democracy. Millions work, pay taxes, use and provide services, but are denied any of the rights enjoyed by citizens and other legal residents: the right to have a say in government, the right to organize and petition and complain, the right to due process, the right to say no. Transforming the undocumented into legal workers, and the legal into individuals with some of the attributes of citizenry, even if devoid of nationality, is the best remedy among various objectionable or unworkable solutions to this intractable problem.

There are obstacles, undoubtedly. Legalizing current undocumented immigrants would encourage more to come; there is a virtually unlimited supply ready to move and it will last until the jobs run out. The cultural resistance in the United States to the type of immigration involved--poor, brown, Catholic--is, to say the least, powerful; so is its political expression, from Pat Buchanan to part of what’s left of the labor movement.

It would take great leadership and much daring to swing the American public behind immigration reform and legalization. That only makes the effort to change all the more worthwhile, for the consequences of letting bad enough alone can, with time and misfortune, tear a nation apart.