When my immigrant grandparents brought their family to Ellis Island, they were subject to a rigorous health examination. In fact, the youngest son of a family of 3 sons, did NOT pass the examination, and was sent back ALONE at 13 years old to Bohemia. My great Grandparents were faced with the decision of abandoning their youngest son if they wanted entry into America. This is a far cry from the new Mexican immigrants, who bypass the entire application process to enter the country illegally.

Ellis Island immigrants didn't get free medical care, didn't get food stamps, didn't get subsidized housing, or any of the welfare benefits that the most current Mexican immigrants are using to get by. Nor were Ellis Island immigrants given the option of education in their "native language". And the authorities ruthlessly rooted out any sort of the sort of ethnic divisiveness or "balkanization" that might occur. Neo-Marxist "multiculturalism" and "diversity" was not heard of. The choice was to assimilate, adopt an American identity, even Anglo-Saxonize your name, or get out. If you wanted to go to public school, you had to learn English, or you didn't get an education.

In point of fact, this new immigration insults even the more recent immigration waves. Vietnamese and Thai refugees were crowded into miserable refugee camps, enduring years of crowded conditions, disease and misery, waiting for their applications for immigration to be improved. Instead of being in the tradition of Thai and Vietnamese immigration who f ollowed the rules,  the new immigrants demand to get in front of the line.

Mexican immigrants demand all the rights of citizenship even though they bypass the application process. They just walk into the country, get a job, and start living here, with no intention of adopting American values, much less respecting them. Their leaders and advocates deny the significance of our cultural values in the success of American Democracy. They even claim that the country was "stolen" from Mexico, and that they---loyal to their "blood"----are the authentic owners of the American Southwest!

This behavior is an insult to the legacy of Ellis Island, and the Boat people, and almost anyone else who was poor and hungry and sought economic refuge in the Land of the Free. Which is why you see so many Asian and and older Latino immigrant communities joining their Ellis Island brethren in demanding that the government limit the numbers of immigrants, and enforcement of our laws and national sovereignty.

The literate elites in Academia and Media have made clear immigration is part of their goal of changing America's ethnic and moral makeup, of changing the balance away from the largely white working and middle classes who are have been voting Republican lately toward a permanent underclass which will vote Democrat and support their liberal social agenda. For 35 years, the liberal elite has always pushed reforms that make other people pay for their sense of social justice. It's easy to be for immigration if you aren't touched by it, just as it was easy to be for forced busing as long as it wasn't YOUR child that was being bused out of his neighborhood. Chances are if you're a white well-to-do, highly educated liberal, your kids don't have to go to school with the kids of Mexican illegals, nor do they stand in line behind illegals mobbing your emergency room at your local hospital. And with your advanced education and Ivy League college education, it won't be you that is competing with immigrants for blue collar jobs.

Forced busing, along with urban renewal, have been widely acknowledged as examples of the failure of elitist liberalism.  Forced busing was far more successful in increasing racial tensions then it was in removing differences in school funding between black and ethnic white neighborhoods.  By far, forced busing was most successful in stimulating "white flight" to the suburbs, the destruction of traditional ethnic communities that formed the economic basis of America's cities, and 30 years of "urban blight." Even today the effects of this disastrous exercise in moral arrogance continues to haunt America's landscape, with middle class families seeking protection of their children from the black underclass living in cities.

What little resurrection we see in America's cities is being provided by basically childless urban sophisticates, dedicated to materialism and consumerism instead of families with children. In other words, "Yuppies". These well-to-do white liberals are still displacing the black underclass in America's cities from their traditional neighborhoods such as Harlem in NYC, or NE Washington DC.  At the same time, the old living wage jobs as janitors and laborers that working class blacks used to rely on are being taken by illegal immigrants working at starvation wages. It's not surprisingly that the economic desperation of the black underclass remains unresolved.

Ironically, the enabling of unrestrained immigration by these liberal hypocrites has the potential of even more damage to the black underclass, as the motivation to hire illegals is based on an insidious racism that uneducated blacks---and ethnic white Americans for that matter---are lazy and unwilling to work hard. In fact, the opposite is true...most urban blacks do not see any benefit in taking jobs that pay so little that one can't afford even rent an apartment, much less save enough to marry and form a family.

It is not unexpected that the liberal elites are being aided and financed by the royalists in Wall Street and the Country Clubs in their quest to change America's ethnic composition.  The  Ivory Tower economists at right wing think-tanks like CATO or the AEI see massive unrestrained immigration as a way of leveraging resentment in the electorate against the immigrant invasion into political opposition toward the Nixon era Welfare State. Corporate America wants the cheap labor, and a vast army of the unemployed as leverage to knock down wages and benefits for their present workforce.

Far from assimilating, any study on the Mexican immigrants show that they are trapped in a cycle of poverty. The wages of the jobs these immigrants take are so low that to get by, they have to rely on welfare benefits, the unearned income tax (the negative income tax), food stamps and subsidized housing. The truth is not that immigrants do the "work that Americans won't do",  but that Americans would do this work if it provided a living wage and decent benefits. The latest generation immigrants of Latino immgrants bid down manual jobs like janitor, or assembler, or construction worker, turning these occuptions from living wage jobs to welfare jobs. This hurts our existing underclass, especially black families. These immigrants are caught in a cycle of low wages and proverty that will create a new permanent ethnic underclass, which will compete with the retiring babyboomers for resources of America's crumbling welfare state.

By massive majority in almost every poll, Americans want enforcement, not a "guest worker program" to benefit unscrupulous businesses who want to push the social costs of their profits on the public. Let's prove that the government can control the borders and enforce the laws penalizing unscrupulous businessmen for hiring illegals, before we discuss any 'amnesty' program.