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A Case of indigestionEven Before Latino Influx, Our Melting-Pot Brew Wasn't Always Smooth.
Omaha World - Herald 06/23/05

A vital source of labor -- or illegal trespassers. Human beings with legitimate needs -- or leeches who export money and import trouble.

Which of these contradictory statements represents America's true view of the Latino immigrants, legal and illegal, flooding northward into our cities and towns?

It depends on who in America is talking. Such has long been our people's conflicted attitude toward their ideal of the melting pot. The latest immigration wave stands out for the strong passions it sparks on both sides of the debate. American society has an interest in reducing the polarization over this far-ranging demographic development.

The hostility to, and exasperation over, illegal immigration in particular appears to be escalating. Here are some recent examples:

A police chief in New Ipswich, N.H., has been charging undocumented Latinos with trespassing, claiming that U.S. immigration agents wouldn't remove them. W. Garrett Chamberlain is being applauded by some West Coast residents, and a neighboring police chief has followed his lead.

The Mexican government fears a backlash in which "vigilante police chiefs . . . will round up people based on the color of their skin," a civilrights activist in New Hampshire told the Washington Post.

In Idaho, a county commissioner -- himself a Latino -- is contemplating suing employers of illegal immigrants. He has sent a bill to the Mexican government for more than $2 million, ostensibly to recoup taxpayers' costs of serving illegals.

"There is nothing racial about this," Robert Vasquez, 55, told the New York Times. "The only color involved is green -- for money."

Meanwhile, a report by the Pew Hispanic Center explains that illegal immigrants, numbering 10.3 million since 1990, are seeking oppor- tunities not just in the Southwest and the Midlands but in the Deep South as well.

Much of this follows the pattern from America's basic melting- pot script. Immigrants hear the call of opportunity and freedom. Believers in the ideal welcome them to their new home. Below the rosy surface, however, other Americans see different colors, hear different languages and allege economic, cultural, even criminal threats.

Usually, the new arrivals' families assimilate as the decades pass. Germans, Irish, Chinese, Italians, Japanese, Poles, Jews -- all these, and more, moved through this experience in their first generations. (African-Americans and Indians, whose ancestors were dumped into the pot with little or no choice in the matter, have often found the going much rockier.)

The Latino experience is more complex. The oldest families in the Southwest, formerly Spanish and Mexican territory, were there centuries before the Mexican War. Others there and in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states have been American for 100 years or more.

Wave after wave of immigrants has crossed the southern border, suffering the all-too-easy discrimination of appearance and yet seeking this nation, its jobs and its promises by choice. The descendants of those who stayed are more likely to see themselves as American -- like Vasquez, the Texas-born grandson of Mexican immigrants.

Indeed, the mix in the melting pot typically has become smoother the longer the blender runs. But in this anxious post-9/11 age, with heightened expectation for border protection even as caring for the poor remains a fundamental obligation, how much can the blender safely handle?

There are additional considerations. Among them:

What about the harm when clampdowns on legal immigration hinder the ability of U.S. companies and universities to draw on talent from abroad? Indeed, what would be the cost to our ideals and our economy if, in our justified interest in keeping out terrorists and drugs, the hundreds of miles of Mexican border were turned into a bristling Great Wall of America?

What about the effect on the national conversation when activists and academicians fixate on promoting ethnic pride at the expense of the ideal, E Pluribus Unum? Should immigrants, if they leave, be entitled to take U.S. government benefits with them?

Such are among the questions that the United States and its people should work harder to answer together, preferably in tandem with the Mexican government, as the strength of the American melting- pot ideal -- and our ability to digest the latest ingredients in the pot -- is tested once more.