Believe it or not, Bush is a moderate on immigration. But there is angry baying to the right of him, and the US is building a fence on its border with Mexico

I took some film to my local drugstore to be developed at the weekend. What surprised me was that, when I started filling in my details, I was asked not just for my name, address and phone number - but for my apellido, nombre and telefono as well. Drugstores here are always good to gauge the changing moods of society. Not long ago, I saw the almost complete Hispanicisation of a CVS drugstore across the river in Virginia. But this was the first time I have seen a store in Georgetown, a middle-class district of Washington, DC, that had become positively bilingual.

This first started to happen in cities such as Miami and Los Angeles more than two decades ago. I remember standing in a bustling city-centre street in LA back then and being surprised that I could not hear a single word of English - or even see one among the teeming shop, cafe and car signs. Even in areas like Palm Beach County in Florida, English and Spanish have long since been the rule. Now that this trend has reached Washington, we can expect a sudden interest in all things to do with immigration.

And so there is. President Bush had his say in his State of the Union address last month. This month, Bill HR418, better known as the "Real ID Act of 2005", passed the House of Representatives by 261 votes to 161, and may well sail through the Senate.

It was introduced by a Republican congressman named James Sensenbrenner, a 61-year-old angry white man best known for his membership of the House panel that prosecuted Bill Clinton in the impeachment trial of 1999. His bill mandates the construction of a three-and-a-half-mile-long fence between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants; gives judges more powers to deport them; and bans them from holding driving licences. It also allows the government to pre-empt environmental and other laws in the construction of walls, fences, roads and other barriers along America's 7,500 miles of border.

The voice of the left, or even of the centre, has long since been lost in the immigration debate. That debate is now between the right (exemplified by Bush) and the far right (exemplified by Sensenbrenner). Superficially at least, Bush seems uncharacteristically enlightened on immigration. He calls immigrants "good-hearted people who are coming here to work", and told Congress in his State of the Union address on 2 February that "we should not be content with laws that punish people who want only to provide for their families". In this case, Bush is a member of what I call the pragmatic right.

The debate over immigration here is decidedly different from that in the UK. You could even say that it is more humane. Until now, it has been largely accepted in America that immigrants are the lifeblood of the economy and that a continual flow is therefore necessary to sustain the country. The likes of Bush find themselves fellow-travellers in the belief that, in the words of the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, "this country has always benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world".

Throw in the sentimentality that Bush finds useful to justify his policies - in Bushworld good, decent folks are all just bursting to embrace Bush values - and you have the Bush doctrine on immigration: that immigrant labour is the essential fuel that keeps businesses in Texas and elsewhere raking in those healthy, all-American profits.

Indeed, it is projected that the US population will increase to 420 million by 2050, with the numbers of blacks and whites declining, but the number of Hispanics doubling. One in eight of those who live in America was born elsewhere; there was a record high of 12 million immigrants in the 1990s and this decade there will be at least 14 million more. Immigrants add $1trn a year to the economy, and will infuse the social security system with a net surplus of $600bn over the next 75 years.

But with more and more visible newcomers to the nation's cities - we can all see for ourselves that the building labourers in DC are predominantly Latino, for example - there is a backlash from the discontented right. CNN, pathetically trying to catch up with Fox News in finding right-wing issues, broadcasts a daily show that highlights what it calls "our unprotected borders". People such as Sensenbrenner, an heir to the Kimberly-Clark paper fortune, see their idea of the American way of life disappearing: they now tell us that 4,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States every day and that there are as many as 20 million illegal immigrants taking advantage of us (the real figure for "undocumented aliens", in fact, is believed to be eight million).

This has led to ugly new manifestations from the baying multitudes of the angry right. Posses to hunt down illegal immigrants have been mustered near the Arizona border. Only a third of the nation supports Bush's "compassionate" approach to immigration.

In Lebanon, Tennessee, a judge ordered a woman to learn English or lose custody of her children. The spectre of terrorism, partly used by Sensenbrenner to justify his bill, is hoisted everywhere: the deputy director of Homeland Security suggested on 16 February that "al-Qaeda has considered using the south-west border to infiltrate the United States".

For Sensenbrenner, I am sure, it is an outrage to see drugstore directions in Spanish as well as English - and if I bump into him in the Georgetown CVS, I will certainly ask him how he feels about it. In the meantime, I have no doubts that the hundreds of thousands of Latinos new to the area only add to its vitality. Seeing them, it is even possible - for a while - to believe in the otherwise elusive American Dream.

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