Americans have always viewed our soil as special -- just being born on the land entitles you to citizenship. Strangers on the land are entitled to certain civil and human rights. But public reactions to last week's beating by sheriff's deputies of undocumented Mexicans in southern California suggests Americans are tiring of this ideal. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez is author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father" (Viking-Penguin) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion.

What a remarkable country America is. Only several days after being beaten on television, in broad daylight, by two Riverside County sheriff's deputies, several Mexican citizens have filed suit. In the United States, after all, isn't every person -- whether legally or illegally here -- entitled to certain civil rights?

In many other countries of the world the outsider is always only that -- an outsider, and treated as such. Mexico, for example, has a deplorable record of mistreatment against immigrants who cross its border illegally from Central America. I would rather be a Mexican attempting to enter Texas today than a Guatemalan trying to get into Chiapas.

All last week on talk radio (our conscience) you could hear the thin, hard voices of Californians who said it was just fine with them. Those "illegals" had to be taught a lesson. The sheriff's deputies deserve sympathy. It was all tough guy talk, even if, sometimes, uttered by grandmothers. But sentences tended toward the weak, passive construction: America is being overrun; America is being taken for a fool; America is getting no respect.

In many other countries of the world, citizenship is a matter of blood. In Germany, for example, you gain citizenship to father Germany by a blood tie. You don't have to live in the country to be (theoretically and forever) related to it. Citizenship is, after all, a matter of family. Prove your blood tie and we will take you in.

The United States, by contrast, has traditionally imagined itself to be a nation of orphans. Our two most important images of mother and father, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, have no children of their own. Blood has been less our point than soil. So deep has our sense of this land been, our respect for it, our singular sense of it, that it overrode all considerations of blood. Whether or not your mother is a citizen, if you have the good fortune to be born on this soil, you become one of us. Period.

This sense of our special soil extends to the stranger -- like those Mexicans in their rusty pickup truck in South El Monte. You came here rudely, pushing through traffic, trying to evade our laws. But you are here on our soil. So you are entitled to certain civil and human rights.

There are indications now that many Californians are tiring of the old ideal. Many would prefer to turn America into Germany. Get rid of the notion of land -- make citizenship a matter of blood. With Proposition 187, for example, a majority of Californians decided that the child of parents who were illegally here was not entitled to school or clinic or shelter.

These are tumultuous times. Pity those officers all over the world whose job it is to police borders. All over the world, borders are falling under the incessant feet of the poor. The poor are on the move, on the road. Peasants know thousands of miles of dirt roads and freeways. They know how to drive. They are in airports and train stations. UCLA professors are only just now beginning to imagine a global economy. Mexican peasants picking peaches in the Central Valley of California have known all about it for decades.

As the world is in movement, we in the United States turn afraid. We Californians especially seem intent on defining our civic life by means of exclusion. One strike. Three strikes. Legal/illegal. Legitimate/illegitimate. Where once there used to be a sense of expansiveness to the way we imagined our civic life, there now are only borders.

Mother Mexico has usually washed her hands of those children who left for the United States. But last week it was different: from Mexico City, the Ministry of Foreign Relations sent indignant notes to the U.S. State Department. Despite decades of mistreatment by Mexico against its own citizens, a squandering of the wealth of the country (forcing millions to leave hearth for a dangerous future), despite bloated narco-politicians and corrupt police, Mother Mexico feigned haughty superiority at the gringo.

On this side of the line, dusty Mexico was imagined through various images of water. Why water? Californians speak of unsettling "waves" headed this way from across the desert. Immigration from the South becomes a "flood" or a "tide." In the nightmare imagination of Californians, the desert is turning fluid.

The world is turning fluid. Guatemala, Turkey, the Philippines -- the poor are on the move. Japan, France, the United States -- the rich countries ponder the watery future. Surely the crucial question for the next century will be precisely this: What is the meaning of a border in a world in movement?

Ours is a special quandary. What made America distinctive in the world -- the bedrock of our optimism, the seat of our generosity -- was the notion of land, soil, our blessed ground.

Whack. The deputy's baton hit the stranger to the ground. A brown woman was pulled by her unresisting hair. Thud. Slap. The unblinking lens of the camera recorded it for all the world to see. A day in the life of southern California...

The Mexicans took the blows, literally. They have the bruises to show for it. But those sheriff's deputies were beating away last Monday at something less fleshy, as well. Call it an old America idea, a lofty dream of nationhood -- based on soil. Those deputies beat down an American ideal, and plenty of Californians cheered them for it.