Out of the Shadows.(illegal aliens and social policy, United States and Europe)

When the writer H. G. Wells visited the United States at the turn of the 20th century, he was astonished at the native enthusiasm for immigrants. "Let them all come!" one elderly Yonkers resident exhorted the perplexed Briton. "We can do with them all..." Wells spent the rest of his stay trying to make Americans "understand the apprehension with which this huge dilution of the American people with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants filled me."

Wells was a futurist, but he got it all wrong on immigration. Today, facing global competition for labor talent and dwindling populations, the governments of Europe are increasingly willing to envision their future society as something more like an American ethnic mix, less a European pure breed. Across the European Union, countries are trying to tighten up on illegal immigrants, while welcoming immigrant talent most useful to their economies. The message: bring us your scientists, your techies, your engineers yearning to work. Last month the European Union announced plans for a more liberal residence visa that would make it easier for foreigners to live and work in its 15 member states. Last week in Vienna, Antonio Vitorino, the European Union's commissioner for justice and internal affairs, declared the EU "a region of immigration."

The transatlantic divide on immigration is narrowing. Though often honored in the breach, the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants has never been stronger. George W. Bush is currently considering giving legal status to 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants, in a deal with Mexico likely to be done this fall. Attitudes are changing even among those once most fearful of Mexicans "stealing jobs." The biggest American union organization, the AFL-CIO, has dropped its opposition to new immigration and is now campaigning to organize these arrivals instead. Even more startling, labor unions in Germany are coming to much the same conclusion, publicly acknowledging that their nation needs immigrants to avert future labor shortages. The United States still attracts about 20 percent of all immigrants, but Europe (now at 19 percent) is catching up.

In truth, Europe has shored up waves of migration for hundreds of years. France made up the loss of a generation of men on World War I battlefields by importing Eastern Europeans, Spaniards and Italians. But modern nationalism has been very unfriendly toward foreigners, particularly if they have dark skin. What's happening now is a new round of soul-searching, inspired by entirely practical considerations: economic necessity coupled with the fact that most migration now comes from Africa and Asia. Above all, Europe is rethinking its postwar tradition of providing a haven for political refugees, but shunning "economic immigrants" as a criminally trespassing class. "There have been no actual governmental policies to capture the dynamism of immigrants in Europe," says Demitrious Papademetriou, of the International Migration Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The governments themselves get a D--at best."

Europe began to rethink its attitudes in the late 1990s, motivated in part by a competitive threat from the United States. The United States was growing rapidly with both low inflation and low unemployment, a constellation of positive signs previously thought impossible. One explanation, economists now agree, is that a historic influx of immigrants was fueling growth while lowering upward pressure on wages. And Europe was falling behind. Praising the "clear advantages of the United States' approach to immigration," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder last year gave in to industry demands by announcing the issue of 20,000 five-year visas for information-technology workers.

It was a first halting step. To an extent, the major European nations are employing immigrants to better effect, as the following stories in this section show, but often more by accident than design. In Britain, the rise of free-market ideology has allowed a new class of Indian entrepreneurs to ...