Last week's welfare reform act reflects a seachange in how Americans view the poor. While President Clinton and House Speaker Gingrich vie for credit for the change, the real reason is Americans' growing fear of immigrant workers. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of Days of Obligation (Viking-Penguin), is an essayist for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- America's most famous "Bubbas" -- are anxious to get credit for last week's stunning welfare reform act. But could it be that the persons most responsible for our changing attitudes toward the poor are not our good old boys but illegal immigrants?

From all over the Third World the poor are on the move. They are young, eager for skills, hungry for work. They are worthy adversaries now for the highly paid middle-aged workers in First World economies. We Americans insist on describing illegal immigration in nationalist terms. We talk, for example, of "Mexicans" who cross the border. In fact, every night peasants are coming into the United States to compete with American workers on construction sites, in home care and hotel services.

During the debate over the welfare reform act, religious leaders urged our politicians toward charity. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was singular in his warning: the new welfare legislation will send children onto the streets. But the majority of our politicians in Washington were unsentimental. Gone are the days when a politician needed to express pity toward the poor.

There is a new category of poor people now -- the "working poor". Many of them are "illegally" here. You can see them everywhere in the American city. Chinese women going to sweat shops at dawn; Mexican teenagers sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Korean grocery store; the Filipina who sits with your dying grandmother.

Americans "hire" illegals all the time, though Americans lately express annoyance at the problem of illegal immigration. In fact, Americans express impatience with immigrants in general. The most surprising part of the welfare reform act cuts off government aid to immigrants who are legally in this country but are not citizens.

And why not? Americans aren't in a charitable mood toward foreigners. We feel threatened by them. The foreign worker has soured the way many Americans think about people who are out of work. (If the illegal can find work, then why can't the inner city teenager?)

There is something going on in the American imagination right now that is hard to grasp. At a time when immigrants -- Asian, African, Caribbean, Latino -- are making their way into the workforce at all levels , white America is tempted to write off the native-born unemployed -- especially the black underclass. This white impatience, however, masks a white insecurity about being able to compete in the new world order.

In an earlier America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged us toward a communal responsibility. It was the hallmark of liberal politics for half a century, the notion that we are responsible for one another. Of course, when liberals launched the war on poverty in the 1960s, we also needed the labor of the poor.

Today Pat Buchanan is the only major politician who seems to understand that the American middle class voter is as angry about the rich as she is about the poor. Only Buchanan seems to have heard a widespread anger towards CEOs who mismanage corporations or lay off thousands of workers and then receive multi-million-dollar golden parachutes.

As our sense of the world has grown and our borders are everyday punctured by laborers, our sense of a national community is lessened. Since we compete against workers in Malaysia, and since the teenager crossing from Tijuana wants our son's summer job, there is a diminished sense of a national working society.

In the end, President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich chose the easy target -- the non-working poor. After all, many middle class Americans might resent the 25-year-old baseball millionaires who go on strike. The middle class insecurity towards the international poor is easier to tap. Gingrich and Clinton are, after all, nothing if not political animals. And they know this much about us: The American middle class is no longer sorry about the unemployed. The American middle class is afraid of poor people who are working.