America From Abroad : Mexico’s Resentment Rises Along With Border Barriers : Immigration and NAFTA are ensnared in debates over national identity, history and the ‘American elite.’

With debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement heating up, U.S. authorities this fall launched Operation Blockade, designed to stymie illegal immigration across the Rio Grande.

Generally welcomed as a long-overdue step in the United States, the enhanced enforcement mission drew broad condemnation in Mexico. Outraged Mexican border residents launched “Operation Dignity”--a boycott by Mexican shoppers, long an economic mainstay of U.S. border communities from Brownsville, Tex., near the Gulf Coast to San Diego on the Pacific.

Anti-NAFTA activists recently called on President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to renegotiate, seeking new protections for the rights of expatriate Mexican workers and opposing “the arbitrary, unilateral and discriminatory measures that the government of the United States is adopting along our common border.”

Those varying responses illustrate the clashing perceptions arising from the thorny question of immigration--increasingly a central theme in U.S.-Mexico relations.

While the debate in the United States tends to focus on the controversial subject of the social costs associated with the newcomers--purported immigration-related job loss, public expenses in health care, education and other social services--the issue is couched in decidedly different terms in Mexico, the largest source of new settlers arriving in the United States.

Here, the primary concern is inevitably the feared erosion of Mexican “sovereignty” and the perceived systematic exploitation and mistreatment of Mexican nationals north of the border.

Last week, protesters calling on Mexico to repudiate recent U.S. border actions interrupted President Salinas’ state of the nation speech. Spirited applause erupted, however, when the president reiterated his support for the “human and labor rights” of Mexican citizens in the United States.

In recent months, analysts here have devoted untold time and space to detailed examinations of what is widely viewed as an upsurge in U.S. “xenophobia,” particularly directed against Mexican nationals. Those nationals, observers here seldom fail to point out, perform much of the low-wage, dirty work that underlies U.S. prosperity.

For example, Fernando Solana, Mexico’s secretary of foreign relations, commented during a recent seminar that the United States “doesn’t appear to accept that the migration of Mexican labor is a fundamental factor in the wealth of many states north of the Rio Grande.”

The foreign secretary--the de facto government spokesman on the issue--has also publicly lambasted various immigration-control blueprints proposed by California Gov. Pete Wilson, who, among other things, would strip citizenship from the U.S.-born offspring of illegal immigrants.

Just below the surface bluster, though, there is a sense of collective shame about a bitter irony: Mexico, a nation so rich in natural resources, must export its most precious commodity to its longtime northern adversary.

Indeed, the billions of dollars in annual remittances from Mexican immigrants to family and friends here have helped prop up a faltering economy. And emigration has long served as a safety valve, providing an alternative to social activism and revolt for the disfranchised.

“It is a great indictment that Mexico’s governments have been unable to provide for their own people,” noted Jose Luis Perez Canchola, Tijuana-based human rights prosecutor for the state of Baja California.

In Mexican eyes, the timing of Operation Blockade--the Spanish word, bloqueo , contains the same martial overtones as its English equivalent--was particularly outrageous. Taking such a unilateral action at a time when both nations were pursuing a policy of open borders for transnational commerce suggested, for many, a most humiliating message: We want your cheap labor, but keep the workers on your side of the border.

As columnist Jenaro Villamil Rodriguez wrote last week in the daily El Financiero: “In the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant world of the American elite, the liberalization of commercial frontiers has nothing to do with an opening in the movement of labor--and, more troubling, for an opening in the mentality of a nation.”

On both sides of the border, the NAFTA debate has become entwined with the intractable issue of illegal Mexican immigration.

Pact supporters, including Salinas and President Clinton, have framed the accord as a long-term solution, eventually providing jobs for Mexican citizens who would otherwise head north. Others say NAFTA will make matters worse, dislocating Mexican farmers and others unable to compete with mass-produced U.S. imports, while expanding low-wage border assembly plants that serve as emigration platforms.

But, regardless of NAFTA’s future--a crucial U.S. congressional vote is scheduled next week--few experts believe immigration will ease anytime soon.

Meanwhile, accompanying each border flare-up here are sensationalist, almost apocalyptic press accounts of a frontier perched on the verge of open hostilities. In recent weeks, simultaneous reports of the blockade in Texas, Marine detachments in Arizona and impending National Guard deployments in California might lead the unwary to view the border as a tense war zone--not the bustling and generally peaceful hub of commerce and tourism that it is.

For Mexican caricaturists, the periodic controversies signal the revival of a familiar figure: the hulking, loutish U.S. immigration guard or sheriff, ever-anxious to defend the right of wealthy growers, industrialists and others eager to exploit defenseless Mexican workers.

Improved border barriers--typically hailed by U.S. lawmakers--are universally decried here as the second coming of the Berlin Wall. “Fence of Ignominy,” declared a recent headline in an editorial in the daily La Jornada, which excoriated “the sociopolitical myopia of (U.S.) political leaders.”

As such denunciations illustrate, the entire debate touches on sensitive questions of national identity. Actions such as Operation Blockade tap into a wellspring of historical resentment.

While the “Mexican War” of 1846-48 is a seldom-recalled conflict in the United States, the mortifying defeat is not so easily forgotten here, and with good reason: Mexico lost half of its national territory in the conflict, including most of the current U.S. border states of California, Arizona and New Mexico. The war’s bitter legacy--emphasized in history texts here--has imparted a cautionary note against all U.S. “aggressions,” from military incursions of past eras to present-day anti-drug and immigration strategies.

Nonetheless, the two nations have created joint panels to deal with sensitive issues of water rights, international boundaries and environmental protection, among other themes. Ironically, though, no such binational body examines the vast movement of people through the border. In this area, rhetoric tends to supplant reasoned discussion.

“We need to have some form of permanent, bilateral consultations to work out these kinds of differences,” concluded Perez Canchola, the Baja California human rights monitor. “We are going to be neighbors forever, whether people like it or not. The border isn’t going to go away.”