ON THE FIRST day of August the U.S. Border Patrol arrested a Mexican family – parents, son, daughter, and nephew – in downtown San Diego, a block from the Mexican consulate, the very place supposed to guarantee their security. They were on their way to apply for the matricula consular identification cards the Mexican government routinely issues to Mexican nationals living in the United States. When a friend of the family went to pick up their car later that same day, he too was arrested, then deported.

Though the arrests have spawned internal criticism of Border Patrol policy, the implications for immigrant rights and California's future – increased deportations and detainments, and increased enforcement of homeland security ideology – have been buried by the recall farce. And yet they have everything to do with it; they're part and parcel of an engineered swing to the right, where Republican money buys state regime change – only this time Pete Wilson is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Unlike undocumented Mexicans, Schwarzenegger is the right's favorite kind of immigrant: a white European with a funny accent and lots of money who supports Proposition 187.

Nobody in Hollywood wants to make movies about the California that deported that family, so until they do I'm happy to think vicariously through the British, as I did when I saw Stephen Frears's new film about immigrant London, Dirty Pretty Things. "We are the people you don't see," says Okwe, the film's lead character. "We drive your cabs, clean your hotel rooms, and suck your cocks." Okwe is a Nigerian refugee who drives cabs and works behind a hotel front desk. His few hours of sleep are spent on a couch in a tiny apartment he illegally shares with Senay, a Turkish hotel maid.

Okwe and Senay are surrounded by people who, though they may come from Croatia, China, or Spain, are now just like them, low-wage immigrants trying to earn a living while not being deported or arrested. Since the early '90s London's immigration rate has skyrocketed to a level higher than that of New York City or Los Angeles. While the '70s brought mostly South Asians, the London of the post-cold war era is the one that Frears gives us, the London of Africans, Poles, Arabs, Kosovans, and Iraqis.

Unlike California politicians, Frears is so committed to dealing with the "invisibles" of globalization (most of the film takes place in kitchens, hotel rooms, alleys, and basements) that he doesn't just make white Londoners disappear, he also barely lets them talk. The dialogue and plot belong predominately to the underworld of London's immigrant underclass, and as a result, the film is riddled with constant tension. The characters are always looking over their shoulders, always at risk of being violated, victimized, or put under the knife to trade kidneys for passports. And there is no happy ending of successful settlement and citizenship. Okwe and Senay came to London to escape Nigeria and Turkey. At the film's end, they escape London.

If Dirty Pretty Things is the first major film of post-cold war immigrant London, then The Hour of Two Lights is its first major soundtrack. The brainchild of Terry Hall (a British-born Jew of Polish descent) and Mushtaq (a British-born Muslim with a Bangladeshi father and an Iranian mother), the album begins with the voice of Natasha, a 12-year-old Lebanese girl, and ends with Hall singing, "In the name of freedom, we speak and spell."

Hall and Mushtaq assemble an extraordinary migrant supergroup that almost seems overly handpicked to suit current politics. There's an Algerian rapper and a Jewish clarinetist, a Turkish singer and Romany Red – a group of Polish gypsies who fled Poland for London's East End after having their homes firebombed. There are Iranian flutes and Indian oboes, turntable scratches, and guest spots from Blur's Damon Albarn (his label, Honest Jons, is releasing the album). On "A Gathering Storm," Eva Katzler sings in Hebrew over Arab percussion while Hall intones, "Someone's cooking up enough hate to fill the sky."

The music on The Hour feels like such a radical break precisely because of Hall's and Mushtaq's histories in the British music scene. In the '80s Hall was a key member of the Specials, the pioneering multiracial ska band who ran from the National Front on "Concrete Jungle." Mushtaq was a member of Fun-Da-Mental, the Anglo-Asian protest crew better known for their antiracist politics than for the industrialized hip-hop behind it. But this album makes both bands seem dated, products of England's immigrant past, not its future.

In an article on The Hour that ran in England's Guardian earlier this month, Mushtaq explained that he took the album's title from the Iranian legend that twilight is the most dangerous time for children to be outside playing, "the end of day and the beginning of night, not quite settled." Being "not quite settled" might be the quintessential social danger of economic globalization, leaving a world full of invisible people forced to live without security between homes that won't have them.