View From Europe's 'Tijuana'.(refugees wait in Sangatte, France)

Tariq draws a finger across his throat. "If I go back home, Saddam will kill me." For now, however, his safety is ensured. A three-week journey by train and truck has ended with sanctuary in a Red Cross camp a few thousand miles from Iraq, in the tiny French seaside resort of Sangatte. Not that Tariq (as he calls himself) intends to seek asylum in France. His goal is Britain, 20 miles away and just visible from atop Sangatte's sand dunes. Like most of his fellow refugees, he plans to head for the nearby freight terminal that handles rail traffic through the Channel Tunnel. With luck, he'll dodge the police guards and stow away aboard a Britain-bound train. But the odds are long. Others from the camp say they have tried a dozen times or more. So why persist? "Here in France you can't even work," says Tariq. "In England, there is everything--work, housing and food."

His optimism may be misplaced. Britain has followed other European countries recently in cutting back the prospects and benefits it offers to asylum-seekers. But Tariq's ambitions are nonetheless widely shared. To London's dismay, the Sangatte camp has become a last staging post on the road to an illusory land of plenty. Refugees arriving in France are sometimes found carrying no more than a scrap of paper with the address "Hotel Sangatte." Small wonder the British press talks of an unchecked flow of "asylum shoppers" crisscrossing the new frontier-lite Europe in search of the most generous host. And too often that means Britain.

This drama isn't new, especially to the people of Sangatte, who have lived with the camp for three years. What's changed lately is the political temperature. Recent months have seen the anti-immigrant right score hefty successes in elections across Europe. Over the past five years, nearly 2 million asylum-seekers have found their way into a European Union that has no coherent strategy for managing them or the social and financial challenges they pose. Laws on who gets asylum, and on what grounds, are loose and and easily manipulable, and they vary widely from country to country. Now the voters, alarmed by the events of 9-11, are showing their exasperation. Media attention has focused on Sangatte because it's an apt symbol of political inaction. If the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen and other populists testifies to anything, it's that immigration has become topic A for many Europeans. Yet governments seem helpless.

Immigration involves thorny problems at every level of politics--local, national and international. Begin with Sangatte itself. The camp was opened in 1999, with the admirable intention of sheltering refugees who were sleeping in the streets and parks of downtown Calais, a few miles to the north. Now it's home to a constantly rotating population of about 1,300 asylum-seekers, mostly young Asians and Iraqis, all set on crossing the Chunnel. Their hosts in Sangatte, a community of just 800, complain of a tumbling tourist trade and brawling between rival ethnic groups from the camp. Even by day, riot police cruise the streets. "It's as if we had been invaded," says barkeeper Claude Devos, who keeps a pistol behind the counter for protection. Such sentiments fuel support for Le Pen's right-wing National Front and trouble the government, which now talks of closing down the camp.

It also colors Anglo-French relations. Every week brings more pictures of haggard but elated refugees picked up at the British end of the tunnel after sneaking through the fenced perimeter of the rail terminal and clambering aboard departing trains; having made it through, most will be allowed to stay. British M.P.s mutter about the French's turning a blind ...