Land of Immigrants May Shut Open Door : July 4: Prideful Independence Day oratory aside, immigration issue divides country as fall elections approach.

The Declaration of Independence, in its inventory of reasons for overthrowing a tyrannical government, lists one grievance that seems today almost quaint.

The king, wrote Thomas Jefferson, “has endeavored to prevent the population of these states, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners and refusing to . . . encourage their migrations hither.”

Immigration policy, especially as the fall elections approach, has become as prickly an issue now as then. But the attitude of many Americans has shifted into reverse.

Foreigners today are migrating hither at a pace not seen since the beginning of this century, about a million a year. One recent poll found that 49% of Americans want to slow down that pace and 27% want to stop the flow altogether.

“We need a breather,” said Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.). Eight years ago, Simpson wrote the law that extended amnesty from deportation to more than 3 million illegal immigrants. Now he wants a five-year cutback on all immigration.

If America won’t slam the Golden Door, other lawmakers demand that it at least close the Tortilla Curtain, a sneering epithet for the Mexican border.

According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, only about three in 10 newcomers are “undocumented aliens,” a category unknown in Jefferson’s day. Even so, immigration experts say they are the main source of a rising national hostility toward all immigrants, legal and illegal.

The Mexican border is their path of least resistance, the route of about half the 3.85 million illegals the INS says are in the country. To many immigration critics, the 1,950-mile border is less a flimsy curtain than a tainted spring oozing a sort of social pollution.

“We’re never going to seal off this border, not 100%, not ever,” said Silvestre Reyes. “It’s unrealistic to think we can.”

Reyes is chief of the Border Patrol in the El Paso sector and knows the border as well as anyone. He is a product of its distinct culture, a culture unlike that in any other large section of the United States. Like most border residents, Reyes has relatives on both sides. His grandfather crossed over in 1913.

The El Paso sector is second in size and activity only to San Diego. Across the Rio Grande from El Paso, population 511,000, is Juarez, Mexico, with 1.5 million restless and for the most part desperately poor people. From their hovels in the Third World they gaze across a narrow stream at the First World.

Since Reyes’ arrival a year ago, he has reduced illegal entry dramatically. Instead of chasing down illegals after they cross, his tactic is to discourage them from trying.

He stations agents like cavalry pickets, within view of one another, day and night, along a 9-mile fence on the north bank of the river. About 9,000 aliens used to cross here daily. Now only about 600 make it.

The other 8,400 likely will make it, too, eventually. Reports show that they have simply spread from El Paso to other crossing places in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. Their northward flow is persistent and unceasing, like water around a rock.

To demonstrate that a blockade can work both ways, Mexicans in Juarez responded with a two-day boycott. El Paso merchants grumbled that business fell off by half.

Others on the U.S. side, locals who rely on paying less than minimum wages for lawn mowing, dishwashing, gas pumping and the like, have also let Reyes know what they think of his new policy. Not much.

“I could forsee that,” Reyes said. “They wanted me to keep out the prostitutes and panhandlers and leave the rest alone. I told them they can’t have it both ways.

“I also knew that illegals who used to commute daily now would have to stay for weeks at a time. Or else move on and stay even longer. Why work here for $10 a day when they can go to Dallas or Denver and make $6 an hour?

So the border remains, as always, less a barrier than an inconvenience, more so at some places than at others.

At the other 14 twin cities that straddle the boundary, and at points between, the Border Patrol operates in its traditional way. Agents catch as many illegals as they can on U.S. soil and haul them back to Mexico. They often catch the same ones three and four times a day; agents and aliens soon get to know one another. Illegal entry is often little more than a game.

All the way downstream, where the Rio Grand empties into the Gulf of Mexico, Eufemia Lopez has a small sign nailed to her home on the outskirts of Brownsville, Tex.: “Se Atienen Partos. “ In the local idiom, “Birthing Done Here.” Lopez is a partera, a midwife.

About half her customers are Mexican nationals. They slip across the border in their final days of pregnancy to deliver the gift of life and receive in return a gift provided by the U.S. Constitution. When Lopez registers a birth at the courthouse, the newborn is an American citizen.

In large U.S. cities, mothers too poor to pay--including undocumented ones--have their babies in hospitals at public expense.

All children in America, citizens or not, may attend public schools. In every town on the Mexican border, without exception, the schools are woefully overcrowded.

A research group in Washington, the Center for Immigration Studies, says illegal aliens cost the nation about $7 billion a year in medical, educational and other services. This is the main complaint of the various groups formed to curb immigration.

“We’re just giving away America,” said Glenn Spencer, a spokesman for one such California group called Act Now. “We have too soft a heart.”

Florida claims to spend $1.5 billion a year on social services for about 373,000 illegal immigrants. Its governor argues that this is a federal problem and has sued the government to collect. Texas, with 405,000, and California, with 1.6 million, have filed similar lawsuits.

(Any count of illegal aliens is obviously a guess; they do not come forward to be counted. So figures vary, usually according to the leanings of the counters. The INS estimates strive to be neutral.)

California, a trend-setting state whose population is 28% Hispanic, is out front in anti-immigration activism.

California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, campaigning for reelection, would amend the Constitution to deny citizenship to native-born children of undocumented mothers.

He also favors an initiative on the November ballot that would deny a public education and all but emergency health care to illegal immigrants.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wants to call out the National Guard to seal the Mexican border.

Her Democratic colleague, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who as mayor of San Francisco was a champion of immigrants, now wants to buy tougher border control with a $1 toll on every person who crosses. About 56 million a year cross legally at San Diego, the world’s busiest port of entry. Illegal crossers, of course, do not stop at toll booths.

Congress has already approved $45 million to hire up to 600 more Border Patrol agents, which would raise their strength to an unprecedented 4,000.

“Agents make good salaries for this area,” said Anthony Zavaleta, dean of the liberal arts college at the University of Texas in Brownsville. “We want as many agents as we can get, to help our economy. Will they make a dent in illegal entry? No way.”

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act aimed to stop or at least curtail illegal entry. It hasn’t, at least not so anyone can notice. The reason, immigration authorities agree, has been failure to enforce sanctions against those who hire illegals.

Now the U.S. attorney general has urged a crackdown on such employers as well as an effort to devise documents for legal workers that can’t be forged. One of the law’s spinoffs has been a cottage industry in counterfeiting all along the border. Competition has produced not only quality work but specialization: green cards, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, name it.

“Employers welcome this,” Zavaleta said. “It gives them the excuse that the phony documents looked perfectly good to them.

“But all that is beside the point. The people who sneak across are desperate. Their families are hungry. All they want is to work. If they make a long, hard journey from the Mexican interior, they will persist and will get across. They will stay longer and send money home. Whole villages in southern Mexico depend on American dollars.

“If they could make a decent living in their homeland--by their standards, not ours--they would not leave.”

Zavaleta, who was reared on a ranch in Mexico, also disagrees with the claim of Texas officials that illegal aliens cost the state more than double what they contribute.

“I’ve never bought that as an argument against immigration, legal or illegal. The illegal ones take unfilled jobs nobody else wants. The economy needs them. They buy gas, go shopping, pay taxes, start businesses. How can you measure their future contributions?” Such as, perhaps, that of a college dean.

New York’s illegal-immigrant population is second only to California’s, 510,000 from many nations. But New York’s Gov. Mario Cuomo appears to share the dean’s view--as well as take to heart the Statue of Liberty’s summons to the world’s huddled masses.

Cuomo, also up for reelection, decided against joining the lawsuit with the other three immigrant-heavy states.

“It sends out the wrong message,” he told the New York Times. “I love immigrants. Legal, illegal, they’re not to be despised.” Many New Yorkers, he said, “know well that their own forebears arrived without papers.”

Roberto Martinez said this:

“Talk about immigration in terms of economics is a smoke screen. It is about nativism, about race, and it is ugly.”

Martinez was born in 1937 and reared in the barrios of San Diego. His people came from Texas. He knows all about cafe signs that said: “Dogs and Mexicans not allowed,” knows first-hand what it is like to be rounded up and arrested for no other reason than he looks unmistakably Hispanic.

But he is a fifth-generation American. He had to re-learn Spanish, which his family had long since lost, so he could lay aside his engineering degree, quit his white-collar job and go to work for the American Friends Service Committee on behalf of his distant countrymen.

He also knows personally other native-born Americans who were among the 1.1 million Hispanics rounded up in California’s “Operation Wetback” in 1954 and forcibly deported to Mexico--and lured back whenever growers needed low-wage pickers. He has tried to help many of them prove their American citizenship, but with little success.

“We Americans,” said Martinez, “have always been suspicious of people of different colors, different languages, always treated them badly. Economics plays a part, but it goes deeper.”

Sociologists say it takes at least three generations, down to the immigrant’s children’s children, to complete the immigration process fully.

Today the foreign-born number about 8% of the population. In 1910 the figure was 15% of a much smaller population. Today hostility is directed mainly toward Hispanics and to a lesser extent Asians. But whatever an American’s name--Eisenhower, Goldwater, Toscanini, Brandeis, O’Neill, Rockne, DiMaggio, Clemente, Schwarzkopf--the certainty is that his or her forebears once suffered stinging discrimination.

But “a nation of immigrants” is not just a rhetorical flourish loosed at ethnic picnics. It is an apt description of a sovereign country founded and shaped by people who came from somewhere else.

With one exception: The Mexican border.

That border was established by conquest. And that fact perhaps goes far to explain its ineffectiveness as a boundary.

The treaty that ended U.S. occupation of Mexico City in 1848 turned the northern two-fifths of Mexico into what is now one-fourth of the United States, completing America’s dream of Manifest Destiny.

The Gadsden Purchase of 1853, as an afterthought, added another chunk of Mexican soil for a railroad to speed the occupation. The Mexican president who succumbed to the purchase, Santa Anna, was exiled. A marker in Mexico City calls him “patriot and traitor,” Mexico’s Benedict Arnold.

In short, when America took its Southwest--California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas--it took land, harbors, gold, silver, oil and the homes and labor of 80,000 people whose families had lived there for many generations before America even became a republic. Overnight the conquered became foreigners in their own land with little inclination to declare allegiance to the conquerors.

Neither, necessarily, do their descendants along the border.

“There’s a lingering feeling all along the border that this land was stolen and by rights theirs,” said Martinez. “In Mexico they still call the boundary river by its ancient name, Rio Bravo. And they certainly don’t regard it (as) a criminal act to cross it to find work.”

Just so. The most popular radio station in Mexico is the powerful one in Chihuahua that beams personal messages from home to illegal family members across America.

A Different Perspective

The Southwest, about one-fourth of the United States, does not quite fit the definition “a nation of immigrants.” That portion was taken by conquest from a people unwilling to lose it. A lingering resentment remains along the Mexican border.

* Texas novelist Larry McMurtry captured it in this excerpt from his “Streets of Laredo:”

“Texas or Mexico, what’s the difference?” Joey asked. . . .

“One is Texas and the gringos own it,” Maria said. “This is Mexico. We own it. That’s a difference.”

“It’s two names for the same place,” Joey said. “We should own it all. It was ours once, and we didn’t have to smile at gringos when we crossed the river.”

“I don’t smile at gringos, but Texas was never mine,” Maria said.

* In Hidalgo, Tex., a bronze statue of a man in heroic pose, erected in 1976, stands in a park near the school. An inscription identifies him: “Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, padre de nuestra patria.” The eponymous Hidalgo, the Texas schoolchildren read, was “father of our country.”

* In San Diego, a poster in “Chicano Park,” a grassy lot where Latinos gather, shows a scowling Aztec pointing like Uncle Sam and asking, “Who’s the illegal immigrant, pilgrim?”

* In Brownsville, Tex., and other border cities, Cinco de Mayo, a date commemorating a victory by a relatively small Mexican force over the invading French army, is celebrated with as much enthusiasm as the Fourth of July. Wandering mariachi bands sing their laments, called corridos, which tell of workers who cross the border, get caught, and have to try again.

* One Mexican chambermaid in a McAllen, Tex., motel was asked what would happen if she got caught. “I would be late for work,” she said.

Associated Press