Land Of Opportunity

We are a nation of immigrants, neatly epitomized in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ironic remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution: "Welcome, fellow immigrants." Immigrants come to America for many reasons, but mainly they come because it's the land of opportunity and upward mobility where achievement is more important than inheritance. Uprooting themselves from the familiarity of family, community, and even language and culture, they are self-selected risk-takers, which is why they tend to be hardworking, self-starting, creative, and smart. It's also why immigration has been such an economic plus for America and why so many of us look so favorably on legal immigrants.

Some Americans, however, have reservations, and some, perhaps driven by nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment or concern over the cost of illegal immigrants, decry the huge waves of legal and illegal Hispanic immigration we've seen over the past 50 years: Eleven million illegals live in a shadow world within our borders, reinforced annually by an influx of hundreds of thousands more. They are mainly from Mexico, just a car ride away, so they can maintain real and emotional ties to their home country. The anxiety is that Hispanics will retain their language and culture and thus remain separate from and isolated within America. The popular phrase is that they will acculturate rather than assimilate, for Hispanics can remain within their own culture given the easy accessibility to Spanish TV networks, newspapers, and radio stations--and the fact that many tend to live in large Spanish-speaking enclaves, in places like California--all of which raises the concern that we might become a bilingual country.