Millions of new immigrants have entered the United States over the past decade. Indeed, the country has not seen present-day levels of immigration since the 1920s. Many of today's immigrants came illegally and have taken low-skill/low-paying jobs. Others, highly educated, and have entered the U.S. labor market legally as skilled, well-paid professionals in the fields of high technology, science, and medicine. Still others have come to join family members or as refugees.

This new wave of immigration has sparked an intense debate in the United States. Some embrace today's relatively open-door policy as the continuation of a long-standing tradition in the United States of laying out the welcome mat to newcomers who seek the American promise of freedom and economic opportunity. Others question the wisdom of allowing so many new immigrants into the country, fearing that cherished traditions and values will be eroded.

We invited two immigration experts to discuss this issue: Michael Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and author of The New America: How The Melting Pot Can Work Again, and Victor Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. James Dickmeyer, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, chaired the discussion, which was conducted long distance via a digital video hookup. Following is an abridged transcript of their remarks.

A New Wave of Immigration: Is It Different?

CHAIR: How does the most recent wave of immigration into the United States compare to those of previous periods?

MR. BARONE: The inflows of immigration typically in American history haven't been predicted by most experts. They just occur and surprise us.

If you had told most American demographic experts in 1970 that we were going to have an influx of something on the order of 20 to 30 million immigrants over the next 25 or 30 years, they would have said, "You're crazy. Immigration is a thing of the past. It doesn't happen anymore."

It turns out that we have had big immigration flows. We continued in 2004 [to have] big inflows from Latin America, a majority from Mexico. We do not have precise measurements of actual immigration because a lot of our immigrants are illegal, and we don't keep very good track of illegal immigrants in the United States. The inflow from Asia and to some extent from Latin America outside of Mexico contains a large percentage of people with high levels of skill. From Mexico [there are a] lower percentages of people who have graduated from high school, who have other educational credentials, who have demonstrated skill levels in employment.

So immigration has been continuing. In my book, The New Americans, which was published in 2001, I argued that minority groups of today resemble immigrant groups of 100 years ago. The blacks resemble the Irish, Latinos resemble the Italians, Asians resemble the Jews

The comparisons aren't precise but I think there are still significant resemblances. One of the differences, of course, is that Latin America, and particularly Mexico, is contiguous to the United States, so we do have a large body of people in this country now whose first language is Spanish, who may or may not learn to master the English language

CHAIR: Dr. Hanson, [how is this new] wave of immigrants [different from that of] the early 1900s that came from Europe and so on?

DR. HANSON: Superficially this is not new, but on [reflection] I don't think we've ever had anywhere from 8 to 12 million people primarily concentrated in one geographical area [who] came here under illegal auspices. That's new. And more importantly, the attitude of the host is new. We had a very brutal melting pot assimilation ideology in the 19th century.

But after 30 years of bilingual education in California, which we finally scrapped, we have a Chicano studies program in every state college that's sort of chauvinistic and divisive. We [also] have bilingual government documents. We now in California have [whole] communities where people are coming from Mexico illegally because of family ties.

So you have whole enclaves of people who find that they can re-create Mexico to a certain degree without assimilating after a single generation. So really we have two communities. There [are] literally hundreds of thousands of people who after second generation are not assimilating.

MR. BARRONE: I take a little different view of what has been happening in the United States than Victor Hanson does. And that's because I think that the forces favoring assimilation into the American population remain significantly strong, even if they are somewhat weaker than they were 100 years ago. Victor refers to brutal melting pot assimilation of 100 years ago. People at the time [of former President] Theodore Roosevelt used the term "Americanization."

But of course helping people to master the English language, to understand the workings of American government and the economy, those are things that are not oppression. They are things that are essential to success and upward mobility in the United States. Despite the fact that American university, journalistic, media, and to some extent corporate elites do not believe in assimilation as much as they did 100 years ago, I think the large body of American people and the large body of immigrants believe in assimilation. In my view we're seeing a degree of assimilation and upward mobility [for Latinos] that is probably higher than it was for the Italian-Americans of 100 years ago.

Remember that 100 years ago the process of assimilation did not always seem likely to be successful. A hundred years ago Americans were told that Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants were people of a different race, they could never be assimilated into Anglo-Saxon American civilization. We know today those predictions proved to be wrong. And I think those predictions will be proven to be wrong for the large number of American immigrants that we have today.

Yes, some will go back to their native country as some Italian [and] Greek immigrants of 100 years ago went back to their native country. Some will not learn to master the English language and we need to do a better job in our schools and to abolish this so-called bilingual education that too often is neither bilingual nor education

Assimilation: What Is It and How Does It Work?

CHAIR: Let's talk about this term "assimilation." Dr. Hanson, what signifies finally assimilation? Is it language, is it acceptance of certain values, is it marrying with people of other ethnic groups?

DR. HANSON: It's mastery of the language. It's acceptance of American values, and that can be everything from religious tolerance to [good] treatment of women to family planning to attitudes [about] government. But what I would like to point out is, as I said earlier, we have two phenomena going on. We have the success story on one hand [for] five [or] six out of every [10] illegal aliens.

But the numbers [of illegal immigrants] are so large that if you are failing in 30 to 40 percent of a situation—what that translates into is a quarter of the inmates in the California penal system are illegal aliens. Because we are getting one or two million people [or] three million trying to get across, and anywhere from a million or two who do—the sheer numbers result in de facto apartheid.

And what does that mean in the practical sense? For somebody that doesn't live with this situation it sounds like the market can always adjudicate or we can just go on. But what does that mean [at the community level]? It means you get up in the morning and maybe you have a sofa sitting in your lawn [because people are unaccustomed to using a trash-collection service], or in the case my neighbor, a cow, a dead cow. Or it means when you go to school—we don't have an integrated school in my locale. You have 90 percent of one particular group. Or on my farm that means people come from Mexico and they have very different ideas about women and the role of women in society until they assimilate.

And if you have an attitude in the university or in the school system that [this is] just an alternative vision or an alternative culture, then it's very hard to break [this] down.

And the last point is very important because it's not emphasized nearly enough. It's not a static process, assimilation But because we have so many people coming in and coming in under illegal auspices that we're creating almost a permanent transitory group of a million or two people who are in this process of assimilation, but not assimilation in the 19th century sense. I'm talking about a 30- or 40- or 50-year process.

If we were to have 150,000 legal immigrants from Mexico, control the borders, unleash the formidable powers of assimilation, pretty much what we did in California until about 1965 or 1970, we wouldn't have to go through this ordeal. It would be very easy to do. And we wouldn't privilege Mexican illegal immigration over legal immigration from other countries.

The biggest controversy right now in Fresno County [California], which is ground zero for the illegal immigration explosion, is Sikhs from India, people from southeast Asia who are waiting five and six and seven years for an electrical engineer in the family or a teacher who cannot come in due to the apparatus of government, and yet they see people coming in just by family ties illegally. It's creating a lack of confidence and respect for the law, and it's got a pernicious, eroding effect on the law in general.

New Immigration Proposals

CHAIR: President Bush has a proposal on the table that he put out almost a year ago in which he is suggesting some kinds of mechanisms [by which] you regulate [what some have called] a guest worker program. Would [this] take care of this particular spike [in illegal immigration]?

MR. BARONE: Well, I think that the president's plan, which he announced in January of [2004], which did not make much progress in the Congress, is premised on the idea that there's an economic demand for a large number of immigrants and [that] that demand is being met not only by legal immigrants but by illegal immigrants.

And I think the evidence for that is pretty strong. The workings of the economic marketplace are such that if we suddenly could expel all illegal immigrants from the United States overnight, there would be large parts of our economy that simply wouldn't work. You wouldn't be able to get a clean dish in a restaurant in Los Angeles and things of that nature. So what President Bush's proposal attempts to do is to provide a guest worker program to match willing workers with willing employers to provide some legal status to immigrants in this country.

Interestingly, in Congress that proposal or something of that nature has more support from members of the Democratic Party than from members of President Bush's own Republican Party. Many of the Republicans argue that this is rewarding illegal acts with legal status. The Bush administration makes the argument that their proposal would not put guest workers automatically on a path to citizenship. [However,] some of the Democrats would like a guest worker proposal that would put guest workers automatically on the road to citizenship.

So there's [also] a difference there between the Bush administration and many Democrats in Congress who are active on this issue.

CHAIR: Dr. Hanson, how do you see this debate in terms of [whether] the president [is] giving us a practical solution to [the] problem?

DR. HANSON: The thing to remember about this is [that] it leaves as many questions unanswered as it answers. So you're going to bring in a pool of a quarter million—or 300,000 let's say—guest workers. What are you going to do about the other 700,000 that don't want to participate in the program? Are you going to really enforce the borders or are you going to deport them?

If we have the guest worker program, they're going to have to still have an alternate pool who will want to come illegally [that] you'll have to clamp down on. The people who are in it will want to stay.

There's a psychological, philosophical, moral problem, let's say, in Fresno County when the head of the Farm Bureau says we won't be able to pick the peach crop unless we have 30,000 people here illegally from Oaxaca, [while] the Chamber of Commerce estimates there's 50,000 or 60,000 teenagers without work and the unemployment rate in Fresno County is 16 percent, mostly among first- and second-generation Hispanics. It's a terrible indictment of the system [that] the county or counties that have the highest illegal immigration also have the highest unemployment rates.

MR. BARONE: Isn't one of the reasons that the Central Valley has this high unemployment rate a result of the tougher border enforcement that makes it difficult for people who are working seasonally in the Central Valley agriculture to go back to Mexico or wherever for five months, six months a year? They don't want to risk going back over the line. They'd prefer to stay in Fresno County where they may find themselves eligible for welfare.

DR. HANSON: I don't think so, because one of the other myths of illegal immigration is that it's primarily [for] agriculture, which is only about 20 to 25 percent of illegal aliens. A guest worker program tends to be associated with agriculture, but most illegal aliens who come to central California are working in construction, hotels, restaurants, even though we know people who could do that work are on the unemployment rolls.

Why is that happening? Because [the longer] people live in the United States, the more acquainted they [become] with the various realms of entitlements and they lose that desperate zeal to work. [Also], if you ask employers—and this is why I think it's really a moral issue—they will tell you that they would rather have 18- to 25-year-old people from Mexico who can't speak English because they work much harder than either their children or their cousins who were born in the United States or such people after they're 40 or 50.

So what we're really talking about [is] illegal immigration; it's the big lie that nobody wants to speak of. It's a recycling of human capital. We're taking people from Mexico and, in large part, using up their best years, and then as employers we're throwing them on the entitled industry to take care of them when they're 50. And we do not want to hire their children who are unemployed and not educated, but we do want younger people to replace them so we can start all over again.

The Demand for Immigrant Labor

CHAIR: [There has been] low unemployment over the past couple decades in the United States. [Doesn't this mean] that in terms of the demand side for labor there is still plenty of room for bringing in people and also employing those in the United States who actually seek employment?

MR. BARONE: We've been talking mainly about one portion of the immigration situation in the United States and your question sheds light on some of the other portions of it. That is, an awful lot of our immigrants are highly skilled. Probably a larger percentage of Asians than of Latin immigrants are highly skilled. But we find immigrants filling a lot of positions that Americans simply are not being trained for.

In the scientific, computer, technology fields you have large numbers of immigrants, primarily from Asia. In the medical field, a large number of immigrants. Go to Midwestern hospitals and you'll see that an awful lot of the personnel there, both M.D.s and R.N.s, are South Asian in origin. They come from India, Pakistan, and other countries.

You can fault the United States, I think, for not training more engineers [and] scientists, not channeling more young people who might be capable into going into these fields. But the fact is a lot of our growth and prosperity has been generated by highly skilled immigrants and the economy seems to be producing a major demand for them.

CHAIR: Is there a kind of tipping point? A tipping point in terms of conditions in a country that would lessen [immigrants'] desires to come to the United States?

DR. HANSON: The question is what makes Mexicans in Mexico want to come in such great numbers besides being contiguous and having a history of proximity with the United States and relatives [here].

I think [there is] an unofficial policy [of the Mexican government] that serves it very well, in two or three [ways]. [First], I think [Mexican immigration to the United States] is the second largest earner of foreign exchange after [oil]. About $12 billion in remittances is sent back. It's vital to the Mexican economy.

Second, there's a sense that Mexico will not really [have to] embrace genuine grass-roots political, economic, social, cultural reform if it has sort of a permanent safety valve of one to two million people who [expect to] be housed or fed or clothed at a level that they're constantly being exposed to in international media.

And then there's [the] phenomenon that happens with immigrants from Mexico. In all due respect, the further and the longer they're away from Mexico, the more they romanticize Mexico. So everybody puts a flag on, and they've become a powerful lobbying force. Some of them are, as you know, voters. So it's a win-win-win situation for the Mexican government.

MR. BARONE: Let me add something on the question of a tipping point, because there's one controlled case that may provide some illumination on it, and that's Puerto Rico.

Puerto Ricans are American citizens under a law passed by Congress in 1917, and so they have total access to the United States as U.S. citizens, can come and go as they like, are not subject to any immigration procedures. And in the late 1940s and 1950s, there was a massive Puerto Rican immigration primarily to New York City, the New York metropolitan area. There was this sense that Puerto Rican immigration was ongoing, that the economic levels of life in Puerto Rico were much lower, and that this was a force that was going to continue.

What actually happened was rather different. Starting about 1961 net in-migration from Puerto Rico to the continental United States declined to roughly zero. It has roughly stayed that way ever since. Nineteen sixty-one was also about the point when the per capita income levels in Puerto Rico reached about one-third those in the continental United States. Obviously there's something of a lower cost of living in Puerto Rico as well, which means that the standard of living differential is less than would be implied by those income figures.

Now, Mexico does not have income levels that are one-third those of the United States. It is well below that number at the present time. And I don't think I want to argue that there is a magic tipping point, that when the country reaches one-third of U.S. GDP [gross domestic product] per capita that immigration is going to shut off like you shut off water with a faucet. That's perhaps too mechanical a suggestion.

But I think the case of Puerto Rico does stand for the proposition that there comes a point at which the economic level of the donor country, the donor of immigrants, gets high enough that the volume of immigration declines substantially. That point was reached in Germany in about the 1880s or early 1890s. German emigration declined sharply. It was reached at other points in continental Europe in later periods in different countries. It has reached that point with Korea. Emigration from South Korea peaked in the 1980s and is now very much less than it was before.

And so I think that that process may repeat itself. I'm not prepared to predict precisely when. But it is possible to reach tipping points in immigration where [the] emigration flow from a particular country to the United States is reduced substantially.

DR. HANSON: I'd just like to comment slightly differently on that point because I have studied emigration from [the U.S.] Virgin Islands, for example, [as well as] Puerto Rico.

It does seem that that tipping point was in part achieved by the Great Society programs of the 1960s, which for the first time to all Americans really offered emergency room health care free, a lot of family assistance, Social Security levels. So that people who were citizens in [those territories] found that they could have access to health care and a monthly stipend as U.S. citizens. It was not that different from the United States. And that was really the point at which people found that it was not that much advantageous to move to the United States.

So I think we're really not going to have a tipping point until people in central and northern Mexico feel that there's the same type of health, education, and safety network that there is in the United States.

Stopping Illegal Immigration

CHAIR: We talked a lot about Mexico but I think we all know that there are great pressures from many countries. We know that the Mexican border is being used by many, many other people to also enter illegally. What practical mechanisms can [the United States] apply to deal with illegal migration?

MR. BARONE: Well, we can get tougher on border enforcement. In point of fact, that has happened over the past 10 years. Both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration have responded. We have built walls in the highly populated areas of the border near San Diego. We've enhanced border control in El Paso, in some parts of south Texas.

We can probably enhance border control more, I suppose, but we've already done a lot of that. The other means of enforcing law is having the Immigration and Naturalization Service card employers, check identification, check documents, deport illegal immigrants. I think at the current levels of illegal immigration this is really not a practical or feasible thing to do. So I think that if the country wants to bring these people within the law we need to regularize the situation and bring our laws back in line with our labor markets.

CHAIR: Dr. Hanson, what do you think about practical solutions to this?

DR. HANSON: I think there are three or four [things] that could be done. One, of course, as Michael said, is to enforce employer sanctions. The problem now [that] IDs [identification documents] are just fabricated so easily. We'd have to have some type of [secure] identity card. And if there was a stiff fine for employers [who employ illegal labor]—that would help.

Second, we have to change the calculus in the United States that sends the message to Mexicans in Mexico that if you come across as a worker, you're going to be expected to learn English, you're going to be expected to put your kids in a school where they're going to have immersion into the English language, and you're not going to be able to reduplicate the culture of Mexico.

And then, third, I think [it is] very important to work on economic development with Mexico. We see a little bit of it happening along the border.

If we would have a quota of 250,000 or 100,000 legal immigrants, that would send a message to Mexico that for the first time in three decades they are not going to have a full $12 billion in foreign exchange [remittances], and they're going to have to address their problems because they can no longer count on both exporting dissidents and getting in return billions of dollars of foreign exchange.

A final note about amnesty. Michael makes a good point. We're not going to go into Fresno County and go into my hometown and pull out somebody who's 60 years old that's here illegally and send them on a bus back to Tijuana. That would be inhumane.

But on the other hand, the amnesty of the past has been a rolling amnesty. Each [piece of] federal legislation that has been passed has given an amnesty in lieu of changes. The changes never happen but the amnesty occurs and draws people even in greater numbers across the border.

So if all parties could come together and say [that] this is the last amnesty we're going to give and it's only going to be predicated on radical changes in the board of enforcement and legal quotas of immigrants, I think we could get some proper legislation.

MR. BARONE: If we were to have an effective 250,000 quota on immigrants from Mexico, you would have to change the family unification provisions of existing immigration law because that's the basis on which most Latin immigrants, legal immigrants, come into the country.

Immigration - Not a Left-Right Issue

CHAIR: Finally, I'd like to just wrap up with one question. This isn't then a liberal-conservative issue, a left-right issue in the United States [as issues tend] to be?

MR. BARONE: I think it's a debate that runs along a different continuum, a different spectrum. There have been throughout American history, or at least since the 1830s and 1840s when we started getting substantial numbers of immigrants from Ireland, other cultures that were different from the existing culture in the United States, there have been movements of nativism to exclude immigrants altogether.

And there have been people who favored simply open immigration, which is largely what we had in the years before [the] 1921 and 1924 immigration acts.

So as Victor Hanson describes, people who favor free market economics, [like] the late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, join people who favor this kind of immigrant nationalism, like these professors of Chicano studies.

DR. HANSON: I think that's true. I would just add one last comment. I think it has something to do with class lines as well. I think people left and right who are employers, who are intellectuals, who are professors tend to either directly benefit from illegal immigration in the case of some employers or intellectually they see it as part of a positive thing.

But I think other people of the working classes that are in competition for jobs or are of different races [or] are worried about the changing complexity of their communities, they have legitimate worries.

So my experience in talking to thousands of people about it is [that] I can almost predict by one's income level what their attitude is going to be and what they do for a living.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Captions:

Top: An immigrant from Guatemala studying English on a computer gets assistance from an instructor at East Central Community College in Forest, Mississippi. (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis)

Left: Farm workers carry baskets of freshly picked squash to a truck near a field in Homestead, Florida. (AP Photo/J. Pat Carter)

Right: Third graders raise their hands to answer questions at Oasis Elementary School in Oasis, California. Instruction is offered only in English to the school's 650 students, more than 90 percent of whom are Hispanic. (AP Photo/Francis Specker)

Bottom: Father and son entrepreneurs Rafael, left, an immigrant from Mexico, and Ralph Rubio stand at the counter of one of Rubio's Baja Grill restaurants in San Diego, California, a small but growing chain of fast-food eateries establishing locations across the United States. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

Center: Farm workers pick strawberries along a hillside in Oceanside, California. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)