Barone: Well, the inflows of immigration typically in American history I think haven't been predicted by most experts. They just occur and surprise us.

If you had told most American demographic experts in 1970, something more than a quarter century ago, that we were going to have an influx of something on the order of 20 to 30 million immigrants over the next 25, 30 years, they would have said, "You're crazy.

The inflow from Asia and to some extent from Latin America outside of Mexico is relatively high skill or at least contains a large percentage of people with high levels of skill.

From Mexico it's a more downscale immigration on average, with lower percentages of people who have graduated from high school, who have other educational credentials, who have demonstrated skill levels in employment.

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 immigrants of the years before and after 1900, those decades.

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.