The new immigration politics: wherein, for example, the rich and the poor join hands.

THE debate over illegal immigration seems to have grown hackneyed. The same old controversies are rehashed--do illegal aliens contribute more or less than the entitlements they receive? Do they assimilate as fast as previous groups? Is the present mess any different from past waves of foreign immigration? And so on.

Facts, usually lacking or compiled by partisans, are twisted to score points, as the issue of who benefits has replaced the sanctity of law. Various bodies of experts, none of whom know how many illegal aliens are residing inside our borders, offer mutually exclusive testimonies. In exasperation at the lack of reliable data, the argument often devolves into personal anecdote--"Juan is the most hard-working and reliable roofer I've ever hired," or, in contrast, "This is the second time an unlicensed driver without insurance or registration has rammed me and tried to flee the scene."

And yet, the illegal-immigration controversy is not static, as a number of new considerations have recently surfaced to reenergize the debate. One key development is that class and regional fault lines, rather than racial and political differences, have come to define the issue. Views about illegal immigration have become mostly a divide between, on one hand, the poor and the wealthy in most of the United States, and, on the other, the middle class of the American Southwest. Those who have enough money not to worry about taxes and those who receive entitlements combine against beleaguered middle-class voters--who feel squeezed by ever more taxes and yet receive little government help for their children's college tuition or their own health care.

Similarly, those affluent enough to hire nannies, landscapers, and pool sweepers, and who frequently go out to eat and use hotels, are not bothered by the fact that their service help is here illegally. In contrast, carpenters and janitors, who have little opportunity for travel and entertainment and do their own chores at home, bitterly resent cheap alternative labor that is not subject to the same rules as American workers. Upscale suburbanites who see illegal aliens as hard-working servants from 8 to 5 rarely live near them or their children--and so are less aware how poor schools, the lack of English, poverty, gangs, illegality, and crowded housing change the landscape of formerly middle-class neighborhoods in cities like Fresno, San Jose, or Bakersfield. Entire towns in California's San Joaquin Valley--e.g., a Malaga or Parlier--are de facto apartheid communities, whose illegal aliens often commute to work in construction, landscaping, and service industries to an upscale north Fresno that spills into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Most who are served have never set foot in the poor towns of their help a few miles away, and have little interest in whether English is spoken or the municipal coffers are perennially empty.

THE CLASS GAP

Politically, the result is that the U.S. Senate in bipartisan fashion tends to be more lax on the issue than the more populist House. The open-borders Wall Street Journal often lines up on the same side of the issue as the National Council of La Raza--in dire opposition to prairie-fire talk-show hosts, bloggers, and cable-news anchormen who tap into the growing backlash of the proverbial man on the street.

This widening class divide skews party politics. Boutique multiculturalism of the Left collides with bread-and-butter concerns of old-style blue-collar Democratic households. African Americans, many of whom compete for low-wage jobs and may not often hire Hispanic nannies and gardeners or have the capital to demonstrate noblesse oblige, gravitate more toward the position of Rep. Tom Tancredo than that of a Sen. Barbara Boxer. On the GOP side, suburban neoconservatives grate at fed-up traditionalists who bluntly demand deportation and a wall. Upscale Republicans can't quite figure out whether their libertarian open-borders philosophy will lose more of their conservative base than it might gain in new Hispanic voters. In the same way, Democrats are worried that non-Hispanic minorities and ethnics are repelled by fiery constituent La Razistas who chant "!Si, se puede!" And what will liberals do about affirmative-action mandates, when confronted with possible naturalization of more than 10 million aliens--who fit the targeted Hispanic profile, but not the canard that they are deserving of special treatment because of decades of historic and endemic discrimination inside the U.S.?

The recent massive public demonstrations of illegal aliens have also complicated things. The first round of protests--ubiquitous Mexican flags, ethnic placards, and racialist sloganeering--turned millions of Americans off, especially those outside the American Southwest who had little firsthand experience of the decades of controversy over bilingualism in schools, drivers' licenses for illegal aliens, the stridency of Chicano Studies departments, and Reconquista romance. In response to the backlash, the organizers of the second series of such protests changed tactics somewhat, as protesters waved as many American as Mexican flags, along with placards demanding amnesty and citizenship.

But this new tact raised as many problems as it solved. Had the illegal-alien strategic planners unwittingly boxed themselves into a corner? When they attempted to stress their love of America by flying Old Glory and bearing signs asking for citizenship, many Americans perhaps were willing to take them at their newfound word for unity rather than separatism. In theory, this would mean that, in exchange for an end to illegal immigration through strict border enforcement and tough employer sanctions, many here illegally might be allowed to stay to start their citizenship process. But citizenship also demands Americanization--and the melting pot spells an end to bilingual government documents and the mythology of a growing separatist Hispanic culture. Would our May Day protesters really accept that there would no longer be a perpetual pool each year of 1-2 million illegal aliens--unassimilated, without English, and full of romance about Mexico--to provide fresh constituents for La Causa?

After all, avenues for earned citizenship, coupled with the end of open borders and the absence of a guest-worker program, would cut off the continual supply of the newly aggrieved. With rapid assimilation, the need soon would end for Hispanic political caucuses and government Spanish-language interpreters.

RADICALISM COMES NORTH

Another important recent development is growing concern over the Latin American powder keg. After the example of what India and China have achieved by adopting free markets, it seems highly unreasonable for Latin American democracies to return to the bankrupt statist policies of the past. But oil and natural gas at today's astronomical prices can subsidize a great deal of failure, well beyond Bolivia and Venezuela. Furthermore, it is often furor, not reason, that guides popular politics. The problem is not that South Americans in general are worse off than 30 years ago, but that some in their midst have become very much better off--and that such newfound and highly visible affluence has not been shared by all.

The ascendance of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia has revived the romance of creating an antiyanqui bloc of revolutionaries who nationalize foreign companies, gratuitously goad the energy-hungry U.S., and use petrodollar profits to subsidize an otherwise unworkable socialism. Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega are no longer seen as hasbeens of a failed Stalinist past, but are enlisted as recycled avatars of radical change. And strident presidential candidates like Ollanta Humala in Peru and Lopez Obrador of Mexico sound even more radical in their denunciations of the U.S. and dreams of creating a neo-Communist alternative to Western-style capitalism.

In this context, millions of observers of the May Day marches found it unsettling to see that--despite the efforts to Americanize the protests--hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America were shouting about future targeted boycotts and work stoppages, and were accompanied by fringe groups bearing pictures of Che Guevara. The illegal-alien sloganeering in the U.S. has long included a racialist element similar to that in the anger whipped up in indigenous people by Chavez and Morales.

Just as it makes no sense for Latin Americans to vote in these new Peronists who will undo all the political and economic liberalization of the recent past, so too it was paradoxical this spring for angry protesters in Los Angeles and Chicago to wave the flag of the country they seek to avoid and shun the flag of the nation in which they so desperately wish to remain. But that is precisely the point: Anger at "them"--that nebulous American bogeyman--is starting to override all else in the illegal-alien movement here as it does now in general south of the border.

THE ROAD AHEAD

So where do all these developments leave us? Two issues must rise to the fore: border enforcement and assimilation. Before tackling issues like amnesty and guest workers, first simply close the border now to stop the influx. That way we can define the problem now as one of 11 million illegal aliens, rather than later of 15 to 20 million after a long, drawn-out debate.

Then comes assimilation, to which all policies must be subordinated. The key is to divorce the present expatriate Mexican community from their spiritual kindred in Mexico by ensuring that they are the last generation of illegal aliens. Prior amnesties failed because we kept the border open and allowed employers to cheat on enforcement. But if no more can cross our borders unlawfully, and we can insist on strict criteria for citizenship--a clean criminal record, English-language instruction, and so on--then within a decade our shadow population of monolingual Mexican aliens will vanish.

Accordingly, a guest-worker program for Mexicans makes little sense. It would only replenish the supply of perpetually aggrieved second-class citizens who fuel political separatism and radicalism--while lowering domestic wages of the very group of new citizens we are trying to help. More important, the billions of dollars in remittances sent by illegal aliens in the U.S. to Mexico and Latin America are like oil: They only prop up current failed policies. Those who warn that, without remittances, governments to the south would be in dire trouble have it wrong. There might be trouble in the short term, but dire trouble alone will provide the impetus for change.

An end to massive remittances will have two other positive results. First, the newly legal immigrants can begin to save their money to secure things like health insurance and suitable housing--instead of sending nearly half their wages across the border as they live in substandard conditions in the U.S. and look to entitlements to achieve a semblance of parity with native-born Americans. And second, it will give the rhetoric of Chavez, Morales, and Lopez Obrador a chance to have real consequences--as Hispanics can no longer as a birthright simply walk into the hated U.S. and then indulge in the romantic yearning for a distant mother country that they no longer have to endure. Quite soon, as in the case of Castro's Cuba, the anger of aggrieved citizens stuck back home might turn on their own utopians rather than on an Uncle Sam that they can no longer reach.

In short, the immigration debate is being turned upside down. Open borders are no longer seen as liberal, but as elitist and antithetical to the middle class, even as illegal aliens suddenly demand to be Americans (and may soon be asked to match word with deed). And while we thought cheap labor from Mexico, with its attendant social and political problems, was an exclusively American worry, we are starting to see instead that the U.S. is playing with an explosive mixture that may soon engulf much of the Americas.

Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Encounter).