German Sweep Seeks to Nab Illegal Immigrants Before Borders Open : Europe: Seven EU nations will allow free travel starting next month. Crackdown demonstrates nervousness about move.

The trio of border guards making their way through the commuter train--unlocking storerooms, knocking on bathroom doors, canvassing passengers--are the emblem of European skittishness over increasingly open borders.

“ Ihren pass, bitte ,” the agents say to the surprised travelers headed from Strasbourg, France, to Offenburg, Germany. “ Votre carte d’identite, s’il vous plait .” Your passport, please.

As Germany and six other Western European countries prepare to eliminate internal border controls next month, the German government is deploying a special force of 500 guards along its western frontier in what appears to be a last-ditch effort to crack down on illegal immigration through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

The operation, subdued by the standards of the U.S. Border Patrol, is unusual along this normally fluid border: frequent spot checks of trains, buses and automobiles crossing over the Rhine River, which separates France and Germany.

The usual catch also does not compare with American sweeps. The more than 900 illegal immigrants nabbed at the western border since the operation went into effect Dec. 31 is fewer than half the number of people U.S. Border Patrol agents in San Diego might collar in a single evening.

But the German government, for which illegal immigration is a relatively new problem, clearly hopes that the operation will deter Albanians, Kurds, Algerians and others who might try to enter the country illegally.

Beginning March 26, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the three Benelux countries will officially eliminate passport checks at borders between their countries, under the so-called Schengen accord that was forged to advance European unity by creating a single region in which their citizens can move freely.

Many of the 15-nation European Union’s internal borders have already been open or loosely monitored for years and, to prepare for the permanent elimination of checkpoints, the bloc has been tightening its external borders against crime and illegal immigration.

The EU countries have set up the Europol police agency to fight drug trafficking and organized crime and established a common computer system, the Schengen Information System in Stasbourg, containing data on stolen cars, weapons, drugs and arrest warrants.

The countries have also improved judicial cooperation, simplified extradition procedures and expedited the process for expelling illegal immigrants. They have reconciled their definitions of refugee and drawn up a list of third countries from which a visitor will need a visa to enter the EU.

To prevent asylum seekers from shopping around, they drafted the Dublin Convention, which effectively makes an applicant’s rejection by one EU country a rejection by all.

Nonetheless, the approach of open borders is fanning fears, as an estimated 3.5 million to 5.5 million illegal immigrants are believed to live among the EU’s population of about 370 million people.

French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua--who last October established a special 6,200-member police force to lead the battle against “clandestine immigration”--recently demonstrated doubts about the border accord, calling its initial three months a “trial” that presumably could be reversed. Germans consider the accord permanent.

Amid talk by European Union commissioners of broadening the agreement to include all member states, Britain last week loudly threatened to veto any attempt to lift its border checks.

And Germany launched its western border operation. The deployment is aimed at what officials say are organized smuggling rings trying to circumvent tougher controls on Germany’s eastern border with Poland and the Czech Republic by bringing would-be illegal immigrants--mostly Kurds and ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia--into the country through the west.

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Wilfried Vahlenkamp, head of the liaison office between German and French border police in Kehl, said officials discovered the new smuggling route during a rare spot check of vehicles around Christmas. They found two buses with about 100 Albanians from Serbia’s Kosovo province trying to enter Germany without visas. Further checks uncovered vans and taxis full of Albanians.

“Their stories were more or less identical,” Vahlenkamp said. “They went by ferry to Italy, north to France and from France to Germany.” They had paid intermediaries $1,300 to $2,000 for the trip.

The Italian government does not require visas for residents of much of the former Yugoslavia--made up of Serbia and Montenegro--who can demonstrate that they have come as shoppers or tourists.

Italian frontier police say that many people lacking documents and money are turned back, but France and Germany have asked Italy to tighten its checks and require visas.

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Nearly 250 of the illegal immigrants caught since the operation began were traveling in an organized smuggling network. Eighty-two suspected smugglers were arrested, although Vahlenkamp said most of them were drivers and “small fish.”

As Vahlenkamp spoke in his office, agents standing outside examined the license plates on cars and faces of drivers coming across the bridge from Stasbourg, stopping an occasional van or a dark-skinned driver who looked as if he might be a foreigner.

Interior Ministry officials say border police will be permitted to launch such special operations after the Schengen accord goes into effect, under a clause that allows countries to protect themselves against specific threats to public security. But any sweep must be for a limited time and have the agreement of the neighboring country.

“This can only be the exception,” Vahlenkamp said.

Meanwhile, he said, two months into this operation, smugglers are circumventing German border police, sending out scouts with mobile telephones to warn caravans of immigrants when and where guards are on duty.

The three border guards inspecting the train to Offenburg found no one trying to enter Germany illegally. Similar inspections in the previous 12 hours had netted 10 illegal immigrants--a Bolivian, a Zairian, three Moroccans and five Algerians who had entered from France.

Last to be interrogated was the Zairian, whose subsequent expulsion was an example of the increasing cooperation between police forces in Europe.

“ Sprechen Sie Deutsch ? English?” the Germans asked the man--who remained mute--before taking him in handcuffs about 300 yards across a bridge to France, where they handed him over to French border police, who would determine his fate.

The two countries have an agreement--as does Germany with Poland and the Czech Republic--to accept the return of illegal immigrants who pass through their land. In other words, Albanians who entered Germany through France may be deported back to France, and Romanians who entered France through Germany may be returned to Germany.

Romanians, he said, “especially (use) the international trains via Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart to Paris. They have themselves shut into the hollow parts on the top of the cars for two days somewhere in Budapest or Vienna. They are shut away by accomplices and released by others in Paris.”

Vahlenkamp called the Kehl crossing, across from Strasbourg, “a swapping station,” where the two sides trade about 200 illegal immigrants per month.

Germany did not have an illegal immigration problem until 1993, when it tightened its liberal asylum law, which had allowed automatic entry to immigrants requesting political asylum.

Asylum applicants were given shelter--they had to live where the government placed them and could not leave that area--and generous social benefits, often for many years, while exhausting legal appeals. They were not allowed to work in the meantime.

But the program was controversial, and when a record 438,191 people requested asylum in 1992, and extreme right-wing parties made political hay of that fact, the government was moved to change the law, making it easier to reject applicants and expel them faster.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Brussels, William D. Montalbano in Rome, Patrick J. McDonnell in Los Angeles and Sarah White of The Times’ Paris Bureau and Isabelle Maelcamp of The Times’ Brussels Bureau contributed to this report.