One begins by asking about employment. In the 20th century, immigrants found work in industry where training was not an important prerequisite. Such openings aren't as abundant in the post-industrial age, and the result of it is that the relative undereducation of the immigrant class results in relative poverty. Newly arrived adult immigrants are three times as likely as natives to lack a high-school education.
Moreover, the density of the immigrant population is a spur to the kind of ethnocentrism that retards assimilation. This is especially a problem, Camarota observes, with the second generation of immigrants. Their parents had a reason to have come to the United States. Their children, born here, think less of why their parents came than of relative disadvantages they suffer, retarding what John Fonte of the Hudson Institute has usefully called "patriotic assimilation" -- the adoption of America's past as something exclusively relevant to their developing culture.
The result is that the second generation veers in the direction of thinking itself a multicultural exfoliation -- encouraged to continue speaking in Spanish, persevering in Hispanic culture, refreshed by the frequent visits now possible to the original homeland.
Poverty leads, in the immigrant class, to a higher incidence of families without health insurance. Reliance on state welfare grows correspondingly, and since fertility is higher, the strain is greater on the protective engines of their new homeland. And then these -- welfare -- are constantly being reinforced, so that when congressional friends of La Raza promise amnesty, they are identifying themselves with all that is there to entice the immigrants to America in the first place: work, unemployment insurance, health care, education.
The big question before the house is: Does the United States benefit from unregulated immigration? By definition, the answer has been no -- otherwise there would be no such thing as a body of illegal immigrants. Illegal because Congress voted against green cards for the 8 million people who are nevertheless here and are being adopted by Mr. Gephardt the single father, who wants only one thing in return: a vote for Democratic legislators. But what is it that Congress has to legislate, if immigrants can come around in whatever numbers, whenever they want?