To my mind, the influx of legal and illegal immigrants is a serious problem only if integration into America's dynamic culture is impossible. History shows that it's possible for people to integrate from virtually anywhere to virtually anywhere. Therefore the problem he outlines is solvable. Right now, there are points of failure in the process of integration. That's the primary problem. At this moment, it is difficult for anyone to offer a solution without good data. Hopes and dreams are important data. In fact casually dismissing an immigrant's hopes and dreams will exacerbate integration woes. One should consider hopes and dreams to be essential to evaluating the capacity of an immigrant community to successfully integrate. If the current dreams are destructive, don't murder the ones that exist, offer better ones.

RURUDYN: I'm sorry but the inescapable fact––at least for me––is that illegal aliens carry this baggage with them that should make them absolutely unacceptable:

They imagine that because of their reasons or motivations that whatever immigration laws there are, these are laws they don't feel they should have to obey.

When you cut to the chase that means they have already demonstrated that if they can justify to themselves why they should not obey any given law they should feel they don't have to obey: they will not obey it. It would be one thing if these laws were arbitrary and unnecessary; however, given the fact that the debate is now being set by those who impose themselves on us rather than those who have the right as citizens to decide the status of their borders for themselves: how can anyone say these are arbitrary or unnecessary concerns?

HUMINT: When a person breaks the law they forfeit their rights as a citizen. It is redundant to point out that illegal immigrants never had rights as a citizen. Look at what they are doing with their lives. What they’ve done by entering the United States illegally is shift responsibility for their future to the people of the United States. It's a responsibility we have no choice but to own up to. The list of options regarding what to do about their illegal act is long. Incarceration, deportation… the most cowardly decision of all is to move away. If your neighborhood is going to hell, don't pick up and move away! Clean it up! Do something about it! Quit retreating! This problem cannot be ignored. It appears as though politicians are ignoring illegal immigration because Americans are unwilling to do anything about it.

BLACKELK: The United States is a dynamic nation with a wonderful, if occasionally flawed, and proud history. The future should be likewise. We are a nation and not a museum. We are [neither] homogenized nor pasteurized as a nation. Had we been either, we would be a museum, with a brilliant past and stultifyingly boring present reality like much of what Rumsfeld accurately derided as "old Europe." The amazing thing about "old Europe" is how very much it proves day by day not to have been worth saving. Today, the Japanese are among our closest allies and strongest supporters. With the occasional exception of a Winston Churchill, a Margaret Thatcher or a Tony Blair, Europe (outside of the Vatican) has been generally useless since WW II. They want their own freedom (to some small extent) but don't care about anyone else's. When France falls to Islam, I hope we let them grovel for a few years while we throw the insolent words of Chirac and de Villepin back in their faces before Uncle Sugar comes to the rescue of the French. We should let them know it is the last time we save their useless backsides unless they closely follow our foreign policy and military lead thereafter.

HUMINT: Excellent post! The comparison between your family - German settlers raising a family on a farm - to a near relentless wave of unskilled and destitute immigrants hitting our cities, suburbs and rural zones is a stretch, but well worth the time to think about. I've started to think about the immigration problem in engineering terms of equilibrium, pressure and diffusion. In less complicated words, like human dominoes - conditions in one region degrade which results in an exodus. America's leaky borders and ambivalent citizenry have yet to resist diffusion of illegal immigrants. As noted on this thread, dense enclaves have a destabilizing effect. What happens next? The people moving out of the areas immigrants are moving into become secondary and tertiary immigrants. The more affluent of these "cowardly" movers drive up property value in areas priced out of reach of first and second tier movers. If my domino theory is accurate, where does the last one fall? It's easy enough to pick up and move now... or is it. Our children aren't going to be able to afford a home in the neighborhoods they grew up in, or their neighborhoods will become unrecognizable due to the demographic shift. To approach a solution we have to consider reducing the geopolitical pressure causing the primary wave of immigrants. Secondarily, Americans cannot treat their property and community so casually as to abandon it when their neighborhood undergoes a demographic transition. My fellow Americans, in regions overrun, hold your ground. Do what you must to make your community worth living in.

HUMINT: When you think about the word "integrate" do you consider "merge" or "sustainable society" to be a synonym? IMO The sustainability of humanity is proportional to its diversity of culture and ideas. Cognitive clarity of the - past * present * future - is something that many minds asymptotically approach together. That's the real power of the United States! The philosophical and cultural contributions to our society do come from the Protestant Reformation but what do those ideas actually do for us? How did those ideas transform into Super Power?

The power of Reformation logic is that it makes room for diversity of culture and ideas. Do not give it uni-polar credit for creating new culture and new ideas. Agreeing to disagree opens the doors blocking progress and prosperity for all mankind. Now let's ask the question again, why are we powerful? Americans manage to live through iterative bouts of disagreements, learning from each, and finding new agreements about the mechanics of humanity. The more we know about “us”, the more able we are to face unpredictable challenges to “us”. In America, “us”, can fit any human being you can imagine.