Mexico's drug war has a profound effect on immigrants to U.S.

Mexico's drug war is bound to have a profound effect on the lives of Mexican immigrants in the United States.

On the one hand, the image of Mexico's chaos as a spreading contagion most likely will strengthen the hand of anti-immigrant forces. On the other, as Mexican newcomers look back at their increasingly dangerous homeland, they will — consciously or unconsciously — set down deeper roots in the United States.

The Los Angeles Times routinely publishes an astounding statistic: During the last 15 months in Mexico, as the government has cracked down on drug cartels, 7,000 Mexicans have been killed. The carnage has begun to spill over the border. There've been brazen "home invasions" on the west side of Tucson, Ariz., and kidnappings in Phoenix. The cartels pursued the mayor of Ciudad Juarez across the border into El Paso, Texas, where he and his family have sought refuge.

Then, two weeks ago, CNN brought such stories much closer to home for many Americans. As part of the news package titled "Mayhem in Mexico," CNN featured a white couple, Chris and Debra Hall, and their two children, who were robbed and threatened in Baja California by masked gunmen.

Traumatized, the Halls recalled the harrowing incident over and over, as the piece replayed for days. Though Chris and Debra have been vacationing in Mexico since they were teenagers, they vowed never to go back. The CNN reporter ended the story on an ominous note: "The country they loved, stolen from them in the middle of the night on a Mexican highway."

The terror and the truth of the Halls' experience isn't in doubt, and it's a cautionary tale worth telling. But CNN's sharply defined Middle-American angle on Mexico's violence also carried with it an uh-oh factor. When the American majority starts to see itself as the primary victim of Mexican chaos, it can unleash outsized fears and overreactions against a minority.

Even in the best of times, Mexico can easily slip into a menacing role in the American mind. For generations, sailors, soldiers and teenagers would cross the border to break rules they wouldn't dare bend at home. It isn't surprising that the place next door that so many Americans reserve for illicit fun would loom large as a source of social problems and boogeyman evil.

Nearly a century ago, during its revolution, Mexico's social and political problems hopped the border in much the same way they are now — real incidents, easily magnified to chilling effect. Back then, what Americans feared most from their southern neighbor was that its political radicalism would seep northward. In 1915, the Chicago Tribune came close to predicting a race war in the Southwest.