If you blink you may miss them. Don't blink. They are signs of the time.
They are large yellow signs of the sort that use black silhouettes - of falling rocks, leaping deer, playing children - to warn motorists. But the silhouettes on these signs are of a running family - a father, mother and small daughter. They represent illegal immigrants who risk, and sometimes lose, their lives, sprinting through the stream of speeding vehicles to evade a government checkpoint.Here, where the surf rumbles a few hundred yards from the traffic's roar, where the republic runs out of room and the horizon reminds Americans of Asian nations exporting economic challenges and challenging immigrants, here two of the nation's political preoccupations fuse: immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
From the moment in the 18th century when national consciousness began emerging on the thinly settled eastern fringe of this continent, the animating question of American politics has been: What kind of people do we want to be? Uniquely blessed by the burden of choice - the French, for example, do not share our sense of perpetual becoming - we now face, with immigration and NAFTA, choices that will shape who we are.
Legislative hoppers are piled high with proposals, from national identity cards and increased border patrols to diminished entitlements for immigrants, to slow the flow of foreigners. But all such proposals pale in significance when compared with NAFTA.
What impels immigrants to risk everything crossing the freeway - or the ocean it borders? The hope of betterment - in a word, jobs. Most immigrants would prefer to pursue a productive future at home. NAFTA will help potential immigrants to prosper at home - if NAFTA can be rescued from current irrationalities of American politics.
Pat Buchanan Republicans, a small but gingery group, oppose both immigration and NAFTA, an incoherence matched within the Democratic Party. Many Democrats are queasy about acknowledging the principal incentive for immigrants - the availability of entry-level jobs in America - because many black leaders blame the disorderly lives of the inner-city underclass on the supposed unavailability of such jobs. Furthermore, freer trade means, as freedom generally does, an uncertain future, and so is threatening to the timid, including some Democratic constituencies, such as organized labor.
Fear touches the immigration issue at every turn. Does immigration increase crime? Perhaps. But would denying, say, educational entitlements to the children of illegal immigrants serve domestic tranquility?
Because governments are objects of interests and conduits of passions, such as fear, much that governments do is mistaken. But most mistakes - spending here, taxing there - are correctable. However, if this moment for liberalized trade through NAFTA is missed, there will be a spate of surrenders by the government - in the name of "compassion" - to timid interests demanding protection. And if immigration law is changed in a manner that codifies fear and hostility, America's identity will be altered.
In the flood tide of 19th century American confidence, Walt Whitman proclaimed that America was more than a nation; it was a world. The justifiable concern about today's immigration is that America may be becoming less than a nation, a community lacking a clear cultural definition, a mere geographic expression.
Still, remember the reality represented by the silhouettes on the yellow signs. There is something unseemly about an America that is frightened by families sprinting across the freeway to get to work. Such an America has much more to worry about than those families.