Send Back Your Tired, Your Poor . . .

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Once the nation might have empathized with the Chinese immigrants pulled out of the waters off New York City last week. Like generations of previous newcomers, they believed the streets of the U.S. were paved with gold, and so they voluntarily crammed into the filthy hold of a ship for months at sea until it finally foundered off a Long Island beach, drowning six. In many ways they epitomized the "wretched refuse" of teeming foreign shores for whom, in Emma Lazarus' 1883 poem, the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp beside the Golden Door.

Unfriendly commentators seized on their plight to complain that the rules under which Chinese immigrants, in particular, can claim political asylum are overly generous. Under a Bush-ordered loophole in the law, Chinese who say they are victimized by Beijing's strict one-child population rules can enter the country. But only the melodramatic circumstances of their entry make the Chinese unusual. Latinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs and others -- especially those who get into the country illegally -- are also unwelcome to Americans who find their cultures strange. In a country composed almost entirely of immigrants and their descendants, heavy majorities -- around 70% in two polls last year -- favor reducing the flow of people through the Golden Door.

Nor are their sentiments entirely xenophobic. Many contend that at a time of slow job growth and pinched budgets for social services, the country simply cannot accommodate a flood of the world's "homeless, tempest-tost." Bette Hammond, spokeswoman for a California group calling itself STOP IT -- for Stop the Out-of-Control Problems of Immigration Today -- suggests a rewrite of Lazarus: "If the Statue of Liberty could speak, she would say, 'Many of my people are jobless and homeless. My natural resources are fast disappearing from overcrowding and pollution, while my cities are full of crime. My domestic tranquillity is a thing of the past.' "

Like many national trends, the anti-immigrant backlash is appearing first and strongest in California. The nation's most populous state is the biggest lure for illegal immigrants, mainly Mexicans who sneak, run, and tunnel across the frontier in numbers far greater than the border patrol can possibly control. They then compete for jobs in a state that has suffered deeper employment losses than most during the long national recession and limping recovery. Or so say the critics; allies of the immigrants insist they actually make the economy more competitive by taking low-wage, manual-labor jobs that Americans scorn.

In the Marin County town of San Rafael, north of San Francisco, "every day, a few hundred day laborers line the city streets," says Rick Oltman, leader of the Marin Immigration Reform Association. "They come here and live 15 or 20 in an apartment and work one day a week." Last week the city council shelved a plan to build a $175,000 job center for the day laborers. The center, says Oltman, "would just encourage more to come here."

A bigger complaint is the cost of social services such as welfare, medical care and schooling for immigrants and their children who have no right even to be in the country. Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy puts the cost to California at $3 billion a year. Though some illegals pay taxes, he points out that the money goes mainly to Washington, leaving the states to supply the social services from inadequate federal reimbursements. "The state is broke," says an aide to Assemblyman Gil Ferguson. "We've had a multibillion-dollar deficit three years in a row, and yet we continue to pay medical benefits for these illegal immigrants. We take better care of them than of our own people."

More than 20 bills have been introduced in the California legislature this year to limit benefits to illegals. Mountjoy explains the strategy: the state cannot stop them from coming, because policing the borders is solely a federal responsibility. So "you have to stop the benefits of coming here: the educational benefits, the health care, the workmen's compensation." None of the bills has yet passed, though one has cleared the state senate. Two were defeated in early votes, but Mountjoy and allies vow to keep trying to push them through.

Elsewhere in the nation anti-immigrant sentiment is widespread but less intense. Asked specifically by pollsters if they favor curbing immigration, most people say they do, but when presented with a general question as to what they consider the nation's most serious problems, only about 2% mention reducing immigration. Many people too have very mixed feelings. Even in California the most vehement opponents of illegal immigration profess the highest regard for those who come to the U.S. legitimately and even view them as potential allies. "If you came here and obeyed the laws, then you should be on our side, because these people compete with the legal immigrant population," says Oltman, the Marin County leader. He adds that his own wife is an immigrant -- from Belgium.

The politics of immigration has created strange alliances and oppositions. Liberal Democrat Eugene McCarthy and Conservative Democrat Richard Lamm favor restricting immigration, as does archconservative Republican Pat Buchanan. Polls by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, found that African Americans are far more sympathetic than whites to the plight of Haitian refugees, but also far more worried than whites about competition from immigrants for jobs. In Florida's Dade County, where 60% of the residents are now Spanish-speaking, the county commission voted unanimously to repeal a 1980 ordinance making English the sole language for official business. But their opponents are protesting that the repeal violates an English-only amendment to the Florida constitution approved in 1988 by a statewide vote of more than 5 to 1.

Clinton Administration officials fear the potential exists for immigration to become a hot national issue. They perked up their ears when Louisiana Democrat John Breaux, a key figure in Senate budget deliberations, told a home-state audience that the U.S. could save $8 billion a year by cutting social services to illegal immigrants and later repeated the thought, though not the number, on national TV. "When a savvy politician like Breaux does that, it tells you something," says a White House aide. There is some thought that anti-immigrant sentiment is helping Ross Perot to drum up opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which would create a Canada- U.S.-Mexico common market. NAFTA does not deal with immigration, and Perot has not mentioned the subject. But some analysts think he is tapping, deliberately or not, into a vein of anti-Mexican sentiment fed largely by illegal immigration.

The biggest reason for fearing a nationwide backlash is that illegal entries keep going up, despite government attempts to reduce them. The Immigration Control Act of 1986, which imposed criminal penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, stanched the flow just briefly. Arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexican frontier dropped from 1.7 million in the year before the act took effect, to 890,000 three years later. But the number has climbed back to 1.2 million a year. As a rule of thumb two or three illegals get away for every one who is caught, so aliens from Mexico alone might total 4 million a year -- equal to the population of Philadelphia.

The law's principal authors, Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Kentucky Democratic Representative Romano Mazzoli, readily concede their creation needs strengthening. They are among a number of legislators who have introduced bills to tighten procedures for political asylum in particular. That, however, would not help much; asylum seekers account for only about 10% of all people coming into the country. Given the tendency of immigration reform to splinter standard voting blocs into unpredictable fragments, legislators are not likely to push for far-reaching change until more of their countrymen demand it.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and David S. Jackson/San Francisco, with other bureaus