Graphic By: Brittany Stoll

So with that, many immigrant families--or just the father/uncle, sometimes--sneak off to the states and find work under the table. Getting their kids enrolled in school can be a lot of fun, unless their kids happen to have American birth certificates (real or forged), in which case those kids are entitled to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). Because it can be difficult to find well-paying work as an immigrant with skills that can't always be well-articulated to the local populace. The father of a high school friend of mine had a BS in engineering from a respected school in India, but the degree wasn't recognized where he worked, so he was stuck doing the equivalent of ... well, imagine me getting paid basically nothing to sit around and separate nouns from prepositions. Not exactly the most challenging academic work I've ever done.

So they're new to the country, unable to find good work if they do have significant marketable skills, sometimes unable to write much more than a few words and largely dependent on the local social services. The biggest difference between today's immigrants and immigrants back in the 18th century, as I see them, are these:

• More of them, back in the day, spoke English or some variant (though really thick Scottish or Irish brogues are sometimes unintelligible to many of us).
• Social services didn't exist then as they do now.
• Assuming you weren't being imported as a slave, you weren't female and you weren't disabled or old, you had a shot at scraping together a living.

But still we don't like that they take so much of our social service money without giving anything back. Right?

Just a little trouble with that last bit. Some of the not-giving-back is due to the fact that it's pretty bloody hard for the IRS to collect taxes on wages earned under the table. If you don't know what a W-2 is, and you don't fill one out, I'm told you don't pay any taxes on wages earned. (The other side of this is that not all immigrants know how high minimum wage is, and try asking for $5.15 an hour when your prospective employer knows he can throw a rock and wake up five men like you who will work for $20 a day and no bathroom breaks.)

Some of it is the fact that looking at the children and grandchildren of immigrants doesn't bear out the idea that they feed off social services. What percent of American doctors are white? What percent of American doctors were white back in 1950? What percent of doctors under 35 years old are white? Even not looking that high up on the socio-economic calendar, how many shops are owned by first-generation immigrants or their children? (Those of you remembering back to that "They take jobs away from Americans" argument: Do you want a good doctor, or do you just want a doctor who's white? I don't give two shiny red farts where my doctor comes from; I care that my doctor be competent. If you want to be particular, go ahead, but it's not like medical schools will allow bad students to graduate if the good ones aren't enrolled.)

You won't see me arguing that first-generation immigrants are very willing to accept what the system will give them. However, let's please not pretend all immigrant families stay at the poverty level. Let's please also remember that a goodly percent of current Americans living in the lower class or near the poverty line are not first-generation immigrants. Montana and the Dakotas, for example, have some pretty bad problems with poverty, and they weren't full of Hispanic, Latino and Asian immigrants when last I checked.

The third argument is something we've already covered, but let's review a few things:

• Every Spring Break, lots of college students (and sometimes that term is used very loosely) fly all the hell over the place looking to get baked, laid and plastered.
• Most of the ones who go to Mexico would probably not pass the Spanish Language AP exam.
• If you go to Europe and make an effort to speak the local language, the locals will bend over backward accomodating you. Been there, done that, got the adulation for knowing French and some basic Italian.

We do the very things we complain about, and it's rubbish. If you're going somewhere, damn bloody straight you should know the language or have a dictionary, and a lot of immigrant families do what they can to learn the language, which is worlds more than I can say for some people I've met who had no plans to know anything more than Tequila, Jose Cuervo and Donde están mis ropas. These same people then complain about immigrants from lesser countries coming here and not knowing the language. (They tend not to notice the immigrants who already have competent English skills, thus leading to the idea that all the immigrants here have insufficient English skills. Wonderful circular situation, isn't it?)

What it boils down to, for me, is this: we are a nation of immigrants. I am of European mutt stock from various countries and various periods of immigration. Some of my family were here before the colonies rebelled. My paternal grandmother came here in the 1930s. Albert Einstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Joseph Pulitzer, Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie were all immigrants or children of immigrants, yet nowhere are they or their ilk cited when talking about this immigration "problem."

Since we are not a nation of immigrants, and we do not wish to be hypocrites, it seems perfectly sensible to welcome more of the same into this country. After all, what right do we, as children of immigrants, have to say no to more of the same?