a long response (to max's post as well), but i think i've covered the questions, so i won't cut/paste your comments.
exactly my point: migration controls are not and have never been about limiting migration in terms of sheer numbers. migration policy is precisely about making distinctions along these lines, including that of the distinction between legal and illegal. the INS is and should be regarded as a union-busting outfit, as numerous accounts i've seen make more than clear.
when max talks about the labour market in the impoverished terms of supply and demand, i honestly find it a little incredible that he can. most keynsian analyses of migration and its effects on the labour market make a point of noting demand creation (even with a 'lag') as a result of migration in places like australia -- all borne out by historical evidence. what's occuring now, of course, is job creation in things like detention camps (there have been two more built in as many months) as distinct from the explosion in residential construction and the massification of education of the 60s. in any event, that remains a simple thesis for a complex set of circumstances. i would assume a marxist analysis would begin from a critique of the notion of supply and demand as an axiomatic principle in the formation and decomposition of the labour market, not least because labour is (to paraphrase) not a commodity like any other. at least keynsian analyses, which max seems to have forgotten the gist of but announces as a political programme nonetheless, took account of this specificity in their own limited way. rakesh is right to insist, therefore, that max's keynsianism has been reduced to its nationalist assumptions: problems and solutions are figured in nationalist terms.
that said, i find your pessimism about local workers' approach to migrant workers a little overstretched.
a) the UN estimated global migrant numbers in 1993 to be about 100 million, which leaves out the recent migrations from russia and ex-ussr countries, undocumented migrants, and refugees (officially about 19 million in 1993). there's no reason to suppose that simply because recent migrants tend toward the unorganised sectors of the economy, for instance, that there is no constituency that would not approach migration as an axiomatic threat unless they were communists. vietnamese migrants in australia tend to be, rhetorically at least, anti-communist; but quite committed to opposing anti-immigrant politics. that they also tend to work in sectors which are hyperexploited and unorganised, is a problem of the union movement and its strategies. simply because the union movement has failed to organise the informal and casual sectors (which it clearly is now learning to do because this is the regular condition of a substantial part of the workforce) does not mean that workers should be represented as reflexively anti-immigrant -- only that the union movement, those organisations which purport to represent workers, should.
b) i think nathan is right to point to the advances in the AFL-CIO on migration. and they're certainly not communists. the question that remains though is to what extent the current leadership of the AFL-CIO regarded it necessary to acknowledge (and include) the energy and fight that was apparent in the anti-Prop 187 but limit those recognitions to la linea and 'legality'. if there's a basis for an internationalist workers' movement in the US, it's always been here rather than in the moral inflections of 'solidarity'. max continues to sniff at the prospect of internationalism because he regards it as without foundation; but he does so only because he omits these workers from the sense of 'north american workers'.
c) i think the problem with the ultra-left in the US, unlike that of the EU, has yet to take up in any serious way the issue of border controls.
d) perhaps most important of our different conceptions: xenophobia is not i think a symptom (though it certainly remains the case that to even begin to speak about _how_ xenophobia works, one would have to refer to a symptomatology of the experience of capitalist antagonisms); but an important _means_ of class decomposition. the distinction symptom-cause doesn't really operate in the way you imply i think. in that sense, i read those comments as being along the lines of an endless deferral until the revolution, or at least revelation when we form/join the party. my sense would be quite different: anti-border control activism is an integral part of forming an internationalist organisation _and_ (contra max) strengthening local worker organisations against the threat of relocation. the more promising steps i've seen along these lines are those of cross-border organisations of workers in particular sectors or, at the very least, in particular companies -- but a long way to go.
e) yes, most migrations occur between developing countries. but what makes them "more complicated"? i can't see it: the analyses of why those migrations are occuring certainly needs to be considered, but there's no reason i can see to make political distinctions between good and bad border controls depending on the status of a country. guest workers, reliance on slightly stronger currencies, etc -- these are similar. more to the point, the last couple of decades, in these countries in particular, has been about a wave of proletarianisation (one could say, IMF-induced, but not entirely so), throwing peasants off the land, etc -- these are perhaps a little different, but not for all that requiring a different response on the question of border controls. we would do well to recall the moment in history when europe's peasants were tossed off the land and indeed freed themselves from the systems of agricultural exploitation: the response was that of absolutism and the emergence of the modern state, replete with border controls (ie., enclosures) through which to place limits on (and put down) the peasant revolts. without those enclosures, the means to enforce and create what we now call 'labour markets' would not have been possible. but then, i have never supposed the thesis of an antithetical distinction between states and markets as have others.
Angela _________