LONDON -- If you're reading this on a plane or in a hotel, you're part of the problem. But even if you're sitting snugly, smugly at home, you may not be the solution.

The problem is the mass movement of people. This is an expression of a fundamental right of free movement. The right is ancient; in modern times it has been incorporated in U.N. conventions and charters and is practiced every day by millions of persons.

But our fundamental needs for family and community, for education and health care, can be fulfilled only by fixed institutions, stable and continuous patterns of life. Which means that those who stay within that fixed community snarl suspiciously at the migrants and travelers because they disrupt our patterns and make use of what the settled people have created without seeming to contribute to it.

The problems created by rich travelers jetting from modern city to modern city, or for holidays to a once-remote paradise, are meticulously charted by environmentalists. The fixed properties of earth and sea, trees and wildlife, are all pressed and distorted by the mass movement of the well-off. The problem briefly reached the top of political agendas in the Kyoto conference on the environment. But because this modern phenomenon does not have an immediate and palpable impact on the daily life of settled people it is virtually impossible to incorporate it into the domestic agendas of political parties.

Hence millions will come out to protest against U.S. President George W. Bush's war policies, but the protest against his refusal to take the Kyoto conference seriously is a matter of grumbling and reproach. However, the mass movement of the poor is a different matter. This is seen as having a direct and palpable impact on the lives of the settled in developed counties. Here in Britain, the impact of refugees, emigrants and asylum-seekers is rarely out of the headlines, and rarely out of the daily grumbles of ordinary people.

It is hard to think of a subject on which political leaders do more to muddy the question and less to engage the people in an intelligent "conversation." (Prime Minister Tony Blair has recently launched a project for a nationwide "conversation" between New Labour and old voters.)

Last week, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced a new crackdown on the freedoms of those seeking asylum in Britain. (The number of refugees in Britain increased from 43,700 in 1990 to over 122,000 today. If no one pointed to them, they would barely be noticed.) An asylum-seeker has to make his or her claim for asylum immediately on arriving in Britain. If the claim is rejected by the immigration authorities, the seeker then has had the right of appeal.

This is usually done through the agency of specialist lawyers paid for by state-funded legal aid. While the appeal is being considered -- it takes months -- the seeker and family are kept in restricted circumstances. But they are safely here. Blunkett's proposal is to restrict the use of legal aid for appeals and to take the children of the asylum-seeker into state care if the appeal is lost and the parent ordered to return whence they came.

The proposal has been sententiously denounced by Michael Howard, the new leader of the Conservative Party, himself the son of immigrants, who, as home secretary under Prime Minister John Major, was the illiberal scourge of all asylum-seekers.

The political row about this is consequently most unedifying, reeking of people who spout moral virtues when they can or appeal to native fear of immigrants when they have to. It is true that the presence of refugees and poor migrants in British cities does impose a burden on state education, health and housing services.

Immigrants and their children often speak little or poor English -- a problem for schools; perhaps more importantly, they themselves are cut off from the family or community support that would, in their native countries, make dealing with illness or housing possible. Without that support, they are thrown into a dependence on the British welfare state if they want to survive a crisis.

It is this use of state services that gives rise to the resentment of the native British population and the saying that "these asylum-seekers take us for mugs." In popular mythology, this means that foreigners are drawn to Britain in the belief that the British are so blindly easygoing that they will let any wily foreigner exploit the benefits paid for by British workers.

This mythology has been enriched by the fear of Muslim terrorists: Under the cover of asylum laws and the freedom to travel -- symbolized by the planes crashing into New York's twin towers -- evil men will slip into Britain with the sole purpose of destroying it. Hence the growth of the view that modern rights and freedoms benefit only mobile aliens, not the settled, tax-paying natives.

As in all mythologies, there are some very small truths to it. Ease of travel makes mass migration possible and a large non-English speaking immigrant population concentrated in one area does impose a burden on the health and education services there. This burden is slight compared with the input into those services, especially health, provided by immigrant workers. Britain could not sustain health or transport or street-cleaning services without poorly paid immigrants.

More importantly, it is the chance for paid work that lures more migrants, not the hope of sponging off the state. This is apparent in Germany, which attracts by far the largest number of immigrants and refugees in Europe. Since Germany became a unitary state, the same welfare benefits are available throughout the country. But work is not.

So the former East Germany is almost empty of immigrants, while the former West Germany is home for most of the 7.4 million migrants there (at 9 percent of the population, considerably more than Britain's 6.8 percent).

In fact, Britain ranks 11th among countries with migrant stock -- between Pakistan and Kazakstan. The Ukraine and Saudi Arabia are among the countries with smaller populations than Britain that have more immigrants. In percentage terms, Singapore, Belarus and Estonia all have more. In fact, contrary to EU panics, the four countries with the highest percentage of immigrants are all West Asian -- the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan and Israel. In none of these is the lure of welfare-state benefits.

Although all EU countries have policies of trying to reduce the number of immigrants, including refugees, all are dependent on immigrants for at least stabilizing, if not increasing their populations. All native West European populations have reproduction rates below the number needed to sustain population size.

But the real tragedy of all this movement is in the least developed countries. Many of these are losing population through emigration. As those who emigrate tend to be the more highly qualified and ambitious (to the developed world's benefit), the deprivation this inflicts on their home country's ability to raise standard is grindingly worse.

It is not possible to see a peaceful and equable solution to this dilemma. While the developed world insists on maintaining its standard of living by sucking in resources from poor countries, the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America will respond by emigrating, with hopelessness, or with desperate violence. A global economy makes expectations of basic rights and freedoms universal while making the possibility of attaining that more out of reach than ever.