Why This Immigration Scare Is Different : Trade: NAFTA will shift U.S. borders south, and economic equality is the only solution.

It should come as no surprise that, in the midst of a lasting recession, California and the United States are once again becoming obsessed with immigration. Xenophobia, doomsayers’ dire warnings about the “loss of control of our borders” and nativist fears about the fading of the American identity are as American as apple pie--or tacos. As the economy continues to falter and jobs remain scarce, immigrants--legal or otherwise, Mexican or Chinese--are quickly perceived as the culprits.

But there is something different about the present scare, and it will affect the United States’ neighbors across the Rio Grande, the Caribbean Sea or the Panama Canal. The novelty resides in three characteristics of the current frenzy over immigration: the volume and concentration of immigration, the progressive nature of the tax it implicitly exacts on wealthy and middle-class Americans and the pressures being placed on emigration-generating nations to do something about it.

Numbers are hard to come by, since much immigration into the United States is now undocumented. But it seems safe to say that more people now living in the United States are non-U.S. born than at any time since the turn of the century. Moreover, as immigration continues at high rates, it begins to have a cumulative effect that did not exist nearly 100 years ago.

That this percentage is still quite low--under 10%--is less important than the concentration of immigrants in certain cities, states and regions. The United States is beginning to feel the impact of what was previously a strictly European trend. Only 4% or 5% of the population of France, for example, is foreign-born, but 30% to 40% of the inhabitants of Marseilles and certain suburbs of Paris may be from Algeria or Senegal, giving the other dwellers an exaggerated sense of their numbers. In the United States, this trend is making life increasingly difficult both for the immigrants--subjected to racism, exclusion and fear--and for the rest, ever more fearful of losing their identity in what seems to be a unending tide of foreigners. This is particularly the case in Southern and Central California.

Secondly, immigrants in these concentrated areas are the epitome of progressive taxation, although the idea that they are all on welfare and pay no taxes is obviously false. The redistributive nature of taxes is widely known: The rich are taxed to pay for services they often do not use--public education, public health, parks and welfare--and that are consumed massively by those who are less well off, who pay little or no taxes. Undocumented immigrants take this paradox to the extreme, or so it seems: They pay less in taxes than the American poor and consume apparently more in public services. If middle- and upper-class Americans are unwilling to pay taxes for their own poor or underprivileged, they are even more reluctant to do so for the poor from elsewhere.

Because of these two trends, Washington is gradually placing immigration on its foreign-policy agenda. Those most affected are moving more rapidly: Gov. Pete Wilson has been much more insistent on including immigration on the U.S.-Mexican agenda than has President Clinton.

But matters are moving in that direction. A few months back, the White House did ask Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to do its dirty work by first receiving, then deporting the 600-odd Chinese marooned off the coast of both Californias after a wrenching voyage across the Pacific. And Mexico’s latest tribulations with Cuban immigrants/refugees also has its origins in Washington. The United States initially refused to grant visas to Cuban rafters thrown up on Mexican beaches. It has pressured Mexico not to accept exiles from Cuba’s crisis, forcing Mexico it to implement the U.S. Haiti policy: Keep the potential immigrants in their own country before they become a problem at home.

Indeed, the United States and its poorer partners are facing a paradox. By tightening its trade, investment and other links with these nations (through the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Enterprise for the Americas) the United States is, in a sense, shifting its borders south. In the same way that Japanese and European investors may well believe that once in Mexico or Central America they will enjoy unrestricted access to the U.S. market, emigrants (and drug-traffickers, for that matter) are reaching a similar conclusion. They are not entirely mistaken; if all sorts of barriers between Mexico and the United States are brought down, then it is not absurd to think that entry into Mexico is tantamount to access to the United States.

But--and here is the rub for Washington and California--these “new” U.S. borders are not going to be patrolled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service or by U.S. Customs. Consequently, they will continue to be highly porous borders. Mexico will deport a few hundred Chinese “boat people” and send back Cuban shipwreck victims on occasion, but cannot, for now, restrict the flow of its own people, nor do the United States’ dirty work too often or with great enthusiasm.

As long as income differentials between the United States and its neighbors to the south are so wide, immigration will be a fixture of hemispheric relations. Free trade, militarizing the border or changing citizenship laws will have scant impact. Pressuring U.S. neighbors may win American politicians votes and kudos, but not much more.