Borders of Tolerance

Last April, something happened along the Arizona border with Mexico that gave fright to authorities in Washington. A ragtag group of demonstrators, averaging about 60 years of age and calling themselves the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, pitched lawn chairs along a 23-mile stretch of the frontier. Their stated goal was to "observe and report" on the movement of people immigrating illegally from Mexico to the US. Their real goal was to embarrass the US Customs and Border Patrol into stepping up border enforcement.

It was a spectacular public relations coup. In polls, Arizonans overwhelmingly backed the Minutemen; those living near the monitored area of the border took out a full-page newspaper advertisement thanking them. In the weeks that followed, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California governor, endorsed the group. The governors of Arizona and New Mexico each declared a "border state of emergency" that allowed them to spend money on immigration enforcement without going through the budget process. This weekend, a follow-up demonstration is scheduled to bring several thousand volunteers to sites all along the 2,000-mile border.

The Minutemen have faced a great deal of press hostility. George W.Bush has called them vigilantes. Counter- demonstrators on the left have clashed with them. The group itself has been riven by infighting and discredited by promising too much. After early predictions of 14,000 demonstrators for this weekend, the actual turnout - projected at around 4,000 - will disappoint. Still, that is a fourfold rise over the 857 people the group drew to its Arizona event last April.

Anyone who believes the US anti-immigrant movement has fizzled out is engaged in wishful thinking. Arguments about immigration are going to shape the presidential election in 2008, and maybe even the congressional one in 2006.

The US has 34m foreign-born residents. A third are in the country illegally. The benefits of this immigration are not evenly shared. George Borjas, the Harvard economist, believes that immigration is cutting the wages of American workers by 4 per cent. It is hard to say whether Americans are angry at the economic fallout of immigration, at the way it is regulated or simply at the presence of so many foreigners.

There is a grassroots movement against something that is starting to yield political surprises. This summer, a police chief in New Hampshire arrested an undocumented immigrant for "trespassing". Although the arrest was overturned in court, the action met no wide condemnation. Legislators are beginning to act pre-emptively. A Senate bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, the Arizona Republican, calls for high-tech monitoring of the US-Mexico border, tamper-proof identity cards and six-year work permits, after which immigrants are invited to apply for residency and, then, citizenship. McCain-Kennedy, as the bill is called, is rational, humane and bipartisan - and probably not tough enough for the US public.

Hence the Minutemen, whose rise should not surprise us. In America, political anxieties often get channelled into an energetic volunteerism. The growth of street gangs in New York in the 1980s, for instance, was met by the Guardian Angels and other neighbourhood watch groups. The big question is which party gets to channel a movement's energies to its own ends, as Ronald Reagan, Rudolph Giuliani and Bill Clinton managed to do on crime. Democrats are in the market for a populist issue, following their failure to make much headway with protests against the Iraq war. Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton, the favourite for the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 2008, shocked her party by describing herself as "adamantly against illegal immigrants".

Immigration is a much more promising issue for the Democrats than it would at first appear. Although Republicans have traditionally been more sceptical of immigration than Democrats, the economic effects of reducing immigration would favour the Democrats' traditional economic ideas, which focus on raising wages and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, even at the risk of slower growth and some price inflation.

The president's views of immigration, and of the American duty to welcome newcomers, provide an opportunity for Democrats. Mr Bush is firmly on the liberal edge of US public opinion. He has an obvious affection for his Mexican neighbours. In 2001, he made a historic overture to regulate by treaty the entire US-Mexico labor market. Mexicans, who in their home country earn a tenth of what similarly employed Americans do, are the largest immigrant group, and now make up 5 per cent of the US male workforce. As such, they garner most of the attention and bear the brunt of populist complaint.

But there is a paradox. Americans have lived with Hispanic immigration long enough that Mexican has become a "normal" American immigrant ethnicity, along the lines of Polish, Irish, Italian, etc. Americans have a comfortable, if stereotypical, view of Mexicans - as Christian, familial, hard-working farm laborers and restaurant workers. Americans have developed no such comforting clichés about the newer, more "globalized" immigration that is bringing west Africans and Afghans and Sri Lankans. The natives have acquired a rudimentary idea of why having Mexicans in the country means cheap strawberries and neat lawns. After September 11 2001, though, they want an equivalent explanation of why they should welcome, for instance, Saudis. Americans want to put the burden of providing this explanation on the newcomers themselves. That, oddly enough, is what is bringing the Minutemen to the Mexican border this weekend - not worries about immigrants who come from Mexico but worries about those who do not.