Inside the Life of the Migrants Next Door

On a crisp Saturday night in early winter, an armada of Hyundais and Saturns arrived at the colonnaded Bridgehampton Community House in the center of the Hamptons, a thin necklace of ultra-wealthy hamlets at the tip of New York's Long Island.

The Hamptons are best known as a summer playground for Manhattan millionaires. But this night, the people who service the lavish Hamptons lifestyle were throwing their own party. They caravanned from a nearby church, little girls in frilly dresses and pomaded boys in squeaky shoes, shepherded by their parents--the roofers who tack gray slate to colonial homes, the maids who scrub toilets and dust Swarovski stemware, and the gardeners who feed the Hamptons' endless appetite for formal English gardens and straight hedgerows.

The hundred or so guests had gathered for a quinceañera--a souped-up Latino version of a sweet-16 party, thrown for a girl's 15th birthday. But this was a coming-of-age celebration not just for the birthday girl but also for the Mexican community that has grown up in the Hamptons. Nearly all the attendees come from a town called Tuxpan in the green hills of the central-Mexican state of Michoacán, which has seen several generations of young workers move to this far, affluent corner of the U.S. They came with nothing, and many have managed to build a solid facsimile of middle-class American life. Still, most of them are--in the hard parlance of the immigration debate--illegal aliens, part of an emerging presence that was once seen as a blessing but has turned into one of the Hamptons' biggest controversies.

The same souring dynamic echoes in cities and towns from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Tacoma, Wash., as migrants push into new communities with increasing numbers and confidence. Their ascension has caused a thousand brushfires of resentment throughout the country. A TIME poll conducted last week found that 63% of respondents consider illegal immigration a very serious or extremely serious problem in the U.S.

Washington, having heard the call, is creaking into action. President George W. Bush has made it a New Year's resolution to pass a guest-worker program, coupled with robust policing of the border. Under his proposal, undocumented workers already in the U.S. would register here, work for as many as six more years and then return to their native country to reapply if they want to continue living in the U.S. Immigrant advocates oppose the idea, saying that a full amnesty giving permanent legal status is the only practical way to deal with the estimated 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S. without sending the economy, not to mention its poorest workers, into shock. But neither the President nor the amnesty crowd has a bill already rolling through Congress. That distinction belongs to House conservatives, who passed a hard-line border-security measure, stripped of any nod to guest-worker status, in December. The Senate will likely consider it this month.