Jonah: an agreement and a disagreement.

Agreement: Illegal immigration is a growing issue in Britain (& Europe generally, I think), though still not on anything like the U.S. scale. I hear it expressed in terms of “asylum seekers,” which seems to be what you’re hearing too. Still, the tax (esp. Value Added Tax) and “National Insurance” (=Social Security) regime in Britain make it much harder to work illegally. Though I’d add that illegal immigration is a thing that nourishes itself — I mean, at some point, there are enough illegals that it is worth while for crooks to get a forged-document industry up & running, as as happened here. I don’t know if Britain has reached that takeoff point yet.

Disagreement: “Our immigrants are overwhelmingly Christian from a culture that is significantly European (i.e. Spanish) in its political assumptions…” I don’t know about “significantly European.” Latin-American political culture is rather distinctive, and doesn’t bear much resemblance to any European model, not even Spain’s. Levels of corruption are high, there is an abnormally large criminal component in Latin capitalism, and race is a big factor in Latin American societies (except perhaps Argentina’s) in a way it was not traditionally in Europe. (And to the degree that it is nowadays, it’s part of the issue we’re discussing.) You will often hear polite immigration-restrictionists say that Mexico is exporting its poverty problem to us. Impolite ones, like me, will point out that they are also exporting their race problem. Check out the “day laborers” at your local hiring site. They don’t look anything like Vicente Fox & his pals in the Mexican ruling elite. Though of course we could discuss the details, causes, nuances, & prospects for solutions indefinitely, I don’t think it is controversial or seriously un-PC to say that the USA has a race problem, the one it was born with. Why on earth would we want to import another one?

“… and they are eager to become part of the American story.” Even setting aside the kind of mentality revealed in the La Raza memo Kathryn posted last week, which I am willing to believe is a minority point of view among Central-American immigrants, one of the most troubling things about the illegals is their cultural & linguistic uniformity. This is Samuel Huntington’s point. It’s a new thing in American history. The last Great Wave of immigrants was, well, diverse: Irish, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish,… Thrown together in workplaces and (especially) public schools, they had to assimilate, and of course were encouraged to by the dominant culture. With a great majority coming from a single cultural source, bearing a single language, into a nation whose intellectual elites regard assimilation as a species of racist oppression, the situation is utterly different. If today’s Latin American immigrants don’t want to assimilate, they really don’t have to. Certainly there is nothing like the assimilationist pressure on them that worked on the Great Wave immigrants. And of course, assimilation of the Great Wave was much assisted by the moratorium on immigration from 1924 to 1965. I’d feel easier, though not much easier, about the prospects for assimilating the current wave of Latin-American immigrants if someone were suggesting another 40-year moratorium to help the process along. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is — certainly nobody in Congress.