But as Heather MacDonald points out in the current issue of the urban-policy magazine City Journal, there is reason to believe that illegal aliens did not develop these problems solely upon their arrival in the United States. Indeed, illegitimacy is far more common in Mexico than it is in the United States. Likewise, fewer students per capita graduate from high school in Mexico than they do here.
Finally, employers plead that without cheap foreign labor they would not be able to find enough American workers to maintain the surging American economy. But here, too, this seemingly logical supposition doesn't quite fit with reality.
Some U.S. counties with higher than average unemployment rates — such as California's Central Valley, where the unemployment rate often has been in the double digits — are a favored destination of illegal aliens. That suggests that there are already enough American laborers to meet job needs, but a fundamental failure to attract such manpower back into the workplace.
The ultimate — and more challenging — solution to a shortage of laborers may not be illegal immigration or even guest workers, but higher wages, a change in entitlement eligibility laws or a return to our own former positive attitudes about hard, physical work.
Areas in the United States that have experienced far less illegal immigration seem to have no insurmountable problems in manning restaurants, cutting lawns or serving the needs of hotel guests. Travel to the Midwest, for example, and you'll see that students are employed as cooks and maids. Construction relies on legal laborers.
The evidence suggests that massive illegal immigration causes as much upheaval inside Mexico as it supposedly prevents — while aggravating, not solving, problems in the United States.
What we need from this new Congress is not more hysteria about illegal immigration, but more re-examination of what seems true but really is not.