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.'
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