Illegal Immigration

While its true that much of what we hear is election year rhetoric, it is nonetheless true that the United States has a problem – a major problem with illegal immigration.  While its true that we have had both waves of immigration before, and resentment against those waves, this wave seems to be different in that the immigration is coming from an area contiguous with the United States.  That means there is every reason to believe the current wave of illegals will not assimilate into the American culture as previous groups have done.  Their ability to go home and rejuvenate their language and culture and perpetuate it within the U.S. means they may never become Americanized. 

Is this really a problem?  To begin with, the estimates of the number of illegals range from 7 million to over 20 million.  That’s a lot of people – people who have children (who automatically become U. S. citizens when born) who use schools, health care facilities, and social services, yet because they are illegal and receive their wages under the table, don’t pay any taxes.  Their birth rate being twice the norm of Americans, the percentage of our population that is either illegal or the children of illegals will soon approach cataclysmic proportions.  Already, my resident state of Texas has become a “majority minority” state.

Can the rest of America be far behind?

Comments

[Tom]

This is a very interesting debate. The trend now is to champion diversity. We are not expecting anyone to give up anything of themselves in the USA rather we honor their heritage and ancestry. For immigrants that can mean that they are not expected to assimilate into the American culture.

This is a real challenge for our public schools where 85% of the teachers are white females who only speak English. The majority of the students are of color and speaking English as a second language is the norm. As a professor in a Florida University Teacher Education program each student has major work to do understanding how to teach those who are not native English speakers.

So much of our society protects the least of us. Again in school we have the free and reduced lunch programs. Florida has one of the lowest dollars per student ratios in the USA. When you complicate this with a large number of children whose parents do not pay taxes the school system (which we all love to criticize) becomes over-burdened. No Child Left Behind asks us to focus on the least of our students, those who need more attention and that means more funding. This could be asking us to spend the most dollars on those whose parents pay no taxes at all.

This is still the greatest country on earth.

[Sam]

While I am agree that this is "still the greatest country on earth", but "champion diversity" is completely a different issue from illegal immigration, and there is no "heaven on earth" yet, as there is no border at all. Just ask the Mexican to open their border from the sound and see how much they scream :)