Illegal Immigrants

The key question about illegal immigration has finally been answered, said Michelle Malkin in The Washington Times. In the current debate over whether to grant this country's illegal aliens amnesty, the focus has been on jobs, the economy, and national security. What's missing is any serious discussion of whether these 11 million people, most of them Latinos, are assimilating into our population. Do the people who've crossed our borders truly want to be Americans—or do they simply want to set up a separate, Spanish-speaking nation in our midst? Let's ask the hundreds of thousands of Latino separatists who staged angry protests last week in Los Angeles and other cities, waving Mexican flags. 'œBrown is beautiful,' they chanted, and 'œChicano Power.' Some brandished signs saying, 'œThis is a stolen land,' arguing that the American Southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. In portraying the demonstrators as aggrieved minorities, the liberal media, of course, tried to ignore these obvious displays of racism and 'œvirulent anti-American hatred.' But how can the rest of us?

We can't, said Victor Davis Hanson in the Chicago Tribune. The U.S. can absorb hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants every year if they are 'œintegrated throughout the nation in multiethnic neighborhoods.' But illegal aliens, forced to live shadowy lives in 'œapartheid communities' are another story. When you have millions of people who can't speak English and have virtually no education or job skills, the result is the bitter and potentially dangerous underclass on display in California last week. Immigration used to be a process of turning out 'œAmerican patriots,' said John O'Sullivan in National Review. Now, it seems that all we produce is 'œresentful expatriates.'

That's a canard, said Linda Chavez in The New York Times. Evidence that Latinos are assimilating is overwhelming. Census Bureau statistics show that Mexican-born men 'œare more likely to be in the labor force than any other racial or ethnic group.' Almost 50 percent of Latino immigrants are homeowners. Eighty percent of second-generation Hispanics graduate from high school. Like all previous generations of immigrants, 'œLatinos start out on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, but they don't stay there.' And thanks largely to their Catholic upbringing, said David Brooks, also in the Times, they bring their moral values with them. As immigration has surged, violent crime in the U.S. has fallen 57 percent. Teen pregnancies and abortion are declining. If anything, 'œthe recent rise in immigration hasn't been accompanied by social breakdown, but by social repair.' It sounds like the basis of good citizenship.

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Consider the alternative, said Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. In Europe, immigrants face 'œpenalties, sanctions, and deportation,' and the native populations treat them with outright contempt. The result is that immigrant communities in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other nations are isolated and alienated, ripe for radicalism and violence. Let this be a lesson to us. We may tighten our borders, but it would be disastrous to tell the 11 million people already living here that they 'œare somehow unfit to become citizens.'

Leonard Pitts

The Miami Herald