My wife and I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and recently returned for a short stay. The occasion was the wedding of our niece, one of three Korean girls adopted by my sister.

My other sister, who is going on her 27th year teaching math at the same valley high school, has had as her significant other for about the same length of time a Chinese man.

And my grandson, having just turned 4, has a name that epitomizes the multicultural nature of California: Reilly (a name of no particular ethnic derivation that I can discern) Lannin (my mother's Irish-Scottish maiden name) Ramirez. He is, to parse his heritage as closely as I can determine, a Latino some three generations removed from Michoacan, Mexico, with Lithuanian-Serbian (his maternal grandmother) Italian-Dutch-Irish-Scottish (his maternal grandfather) blood. He is, in short, the face of California, and -- in more ways than one -- the face of the future.

I was reflecting on this during a walk my wife and I took one morning during our stay in the Porter Ranch section of Northridge. I had just read a short review of "Orange County Housecleaners" (Frank Cancian, University of New Mexico Press) in the Book Review of that Sunday's Los Angeles Times when my wife and I decided to take advantage of the cool overcast morning and get what at our age passes for a workout.

As we walked along admiring the manicured lawns and common-area landscaping (this was, of course, a gated community, that bane of modern life in metropolitan California, neatly segregating "them" from "us," whomever them and us are) when I noticed a series of manhole covers punctuating the sidewalk. Each manhole cover had "City of Los Angeles -- Made in Mexico" cast unto its upper surface.

Now this might have been an aberration, perhaps some small contract for such items let to a maquiladora firm operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. I did not, given our schedule, have either the opportunity or, to be honest, the inclination to do a manhole-cover-point-of-origination survey for greater metropolitan Los Angeles. And I suspect, given the vagaries of the Pacific Rim economy, there are other isolated patches of "City of Los Angeles -- Made in Taiwan" or "Made in China" or "Made in Indonesia." But the extant manhole covers sufficed as both an idiom and a mirror of California -- "Made in Mexico."

Now I do not, by this statement, intend to demean or minimize the impact of Russian, New England, Southern, Midwestern, dust bowl, Texan, Asian or other non-Mexican influences on the development of the world's fifth-largest economy and the state that is currently home to one of every seven residents in the United States. But the fact is, the predominant cultural, economic and social influence in this state is arguably Mexican. To believe otherwise, it seems to me, is to ignore reality.

Which brings us to the next significant cultural, economic and political issue facing this state in particular and the nation as a whole: The continued and significant migration of Hispanic people from Mexico and Central and South America.

And the current myopic, knee-jerk, counter productive response to a seminal event that has been ongoing for several decades, if not a century or more.

In this regard I refer to the "just build a wall, we'll stop them at the border," gun-nut-infiltrated vigilante groups (not to be confused with both houses of Congress) who seem to believe that the "solution" to this issue is one of traffic control and not economic development.

And while it galls me to say this, I believe President Bush, with his insistence on a guest worker program, has the more logical and workable, not to mention humanistic and moral, approach than do the various we'll-just-seal-up-the-border-and-throw-them-in-jail proposals now percolating and fermenting in the halls of Congress.

Not to mention, it's pragmatic. For as long as Mexico's caste system (it's hard to characterize it as anything else given the social, economic, educational and political disparity between those principally of European ancestry and those of indigenous extraction) continues to stifle economic development and agrarian and land reform in Mexico, and so long as similar issues -- exacerbated by political unrest -- exist in Central and South America, those with ambition and frustrated economic future in their native land will continue to flow north.

And no fence, vigilante posse or Border Patrol, with or without National Guard or (heaven help us) so-called Minuteman Project augmentation, will stop them, so long as there is a reasonable opportunity for employment north of the Rio Grande and particularly so long as their labor is needed in California and the Nation.

Ergo "City of Los Angeles -- Made in Mexico." It's more than just a manhole cover.

(Keyser lives in Napa.)