PURE XENOPHOBIA REMAINS ALIVE IN GLOBAL RELATIONS

Freedom isn't completely free. It sometimes exacts a price by fostering baser instincts that sometimes accompany liberation. In Europe as well as in the United States, the flow of peoples migrating across sovereign borders to seek a better life is slowly growing into an explosive issue.

In a recession, when jobs are short for those already here, it's hard to sell the noble message of the Statue of Liberty: "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Territorial expansion to accommodate growth is over; the frontiers have been reached, if not irrevocably established.

In the French regional elections last week, Jean Marie Le Pen's neo-fascist party substantially increased its share of the vote, running almost even with President Francois Mitterand's Socialists. Le Pen's slogan is "France for the French." Times are tough in France, with unemployment running near 10 percent. Racist music plays loudest from the (taverns, precincts, neighborhoods) of the unemployed.

Pat Buchanan found that to be the case in down-and-out New Hampshire. His tune was "America First." He wants white English-speaking immigrants to come to the United States, not brown or black. No more "Zulus," as he puts it. Come on the Mayflower, not on those crude vessels from Haiti. Mind you, he says he's not a bigot or a hater or a racist. It's just the way he was raised at home and in his 1950s high school.

On the European continent, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism has unleashed waves of people seeking to escape economic oppression. The euphoria of brotherly love evaporates when brotherliness requires the absorption of nationalities one holds in contempt.

West Germans are less accommodating to thousands of migrating East Germans than they were just a few years ago when a trickle of Ostis sought asylum in the West. "My house is your house" sounds nice to an incoming few. "Get out of my house" is more prevalent if one feels overwhelmed. Heroes can turn to nuisances when the numbers change.

Italy turns its back on Albanians. Hungary wants no gypsies from Rumania and would be delighted to export the thousands it has. Austria, the tiny little nation where Hitler was born and so warmly received, doesn't want any Germanic people from anywhere for any reason at any time.

Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia will accept no further immigration from Russia and, as a matter of democratic policy, encourages the non-skilled Russian minority to "return home." Democracy in the Baltics translates into "Baltics for the Baltics."

The Ukraine contains large minorities of Russians, Poles and Jews. With nationalist fervor rising, no one knows how welcome those minorities will be in the years ahead.

In Yugoslavia, centuries-old nationalist hatreds have led to civil war. Freedom includes the freedom to hate. The newly liberated often seize it as the first, most genuine manifestation of free expression. Freedom isn't completely free. Freedom can travel in the ugly, dark corridors of the spirit. Communism is dead, but xenophobia is alive and sick.