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New Patterns in Immigration - Settling in Latin America

                                                      Photo:   Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

Many Mexican migrants now shun the border for Mexican towns like Santa María Atzompa.

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: January 5, 2012

SANTA MARÍA ATZOMPA, Mexico — When the old-timers here look around their town, all they see are new arrivals: young Mexican men working construction and driving down wages; the children of laborers flooding crowded schools; even new businesses — stores, restaurants and strip clubs — springing up on roads that used to be dark and quiet.

Immigration Upended

Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

A Mexican sociologist has called the growth of Santa María Atzompa and the surrounding area “fast, barbaric and anarchic.”

The shock might seem familiar enough in countless American towns wrestling with immigration, but this is a precolonial Mexican village outside Oaxaca City, filling up with fellow Mexicans. Still, grimaces about the influx are as common as smiles.

“Before all these people came, everything was tranquil,” said Marcelino Juárez, 61, an artisan at the local ceramics market. “They bring complications. They don’t bring benefits.”
Throughout Mexico and much of Latin America, the old migratory patterns are changing. The mobile and restless are now casting themselves across a wider range of cities and countries in the region, pitting old residents against new, increasing pressure to create jobs and prompting nations to rewrite their immigration laws, sometimes to encourage the trend.
The United States is simply not the magnet it once was. Arrests at the United States’ southwest border in 2011 fell to their lowest level since 1972, confirming that illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, has reached what experts now describe as either a significant pause or the end of an era.
But this is not a shift in volume as much as direction. Nearly two million more Mexicans lived away from their hometowns in 2010 than was the case a decade earlier, according to the Mexican census. Experts say departures have also held steady or and other Latin American countries that have traditionally been hubs of emigration.
The migrants are just not always going where they used to.
Mexicans, for example, are increasingly avoiding the United States and the border region, as well as their own capital, and are moving toward smaller, safer cities like Mérida, Oaxaca City and Querétaro. Experts say more Guatemalans are also settling in Mexico after years of passing through on the journey north.
To the south, the pull of Chile, Argentina and Brazil is also strengthening. The International Organization for Migration reports that the Bolivian population in Argentina has increased by 48 percent since 2001 (to 345,000), and that the country’s Paraguayan and Peruvian populations have grown even faster.
All of this movement is reshaping the region, making it less like a compass pointing north and more like a hub with many spokes. From the papayas grown by Bolivian farmers in Argentina to the recent discovery of exploited illegal workers in Chile and conflicts over local government in southern Mexico, this intraregional migration in Latin America has become both a challenge and a promising surprise for a part of the world that has generally framed the issue in terms of how many people leave for the United States.
“It’s like a river changing course,” said Gabino Cué Monteagudo, the governor of Oaxaca. “It’s the process of development — it’s inevitable.”
For the United States, the collective shift means fewer migrants crossing the border illegally and possibly more debate over whether the expanded budgets for immigration enforcement still make sense.
But the greatest impacts are being felt in fast-growing towns like Santa María Atzompa, where thousands of mostly poor, rural families have chosen to seek their fortunes. In the case of this town and the surrounding area, the growth has been “fast, barbaric and anarchic,” said Jorge Hernández-Díaz, a sociologist at the Autonomous University of Benito Juárez de Oaxaca.

Read more of this series on immigration patterns:  NY Times

What Does Assimilation Look Like - In Iowa

                                                                     Photo:     wiki.triastelematica.org

For a look at assimilation of immigrants in the US, we need go no further than the heartland - small town rural Iowa where the first bilingual classes in the state began, where initial fears gave way to acceptance, where businesses are now thriving rather than folding.

Downtown West Liberty, Iowa, is quintessentially Midwestern American, both quaint and historic, with brick buildings lining brick streets. A typical stroll involves walking past the bank, a renovated theater, a hair salon, restaurants and stores.

West Liberty Mayor Chad Thomas says that unlike a lot of other small Midwestern towns that are dying, West Liberty is alive.

"I see a lot of businesses that are open, and not vacant storefronts," Thomas says. "Probably half of the businesses are Hispanic-owned."

Next to Paul Revere's Pizza on 3rd Street is Tienda La Luna, and next to the American Legion Hall is the popular Acapulco Mexican Bakery.

Now at 3,700 people and counting, the eastern Iowa town is growing and thriving, Thomas says.

"If you didn't have the Hispanic population here in town, yeah, we would be much more like a lot of smaller towns, and there would be a lot more storefronts that are empty," he says.

And unlike other parts of the Midwest that are attracting Latino immigrants, the Hispanic population in West Liberty is not new.

"I mean, we're very unique in that there's folks in this community, in the Hispanic community, that are here in their fifth and sixth generation," Thomas says.

In the 2000 census, West Liberty was already well over 40 percent Latino, and has been steadily growing for decades.

The first big surge in Latino immigrants arrived in the 1930s for jobs in what was then a Louis Rich turkey processing plant.

That plant, now called West Liberty Foods, is still a draw for some newcomers. But most of the recent increase in the Hispanic population comes from growing, established families who came for the Louis Rich jobs, stayed and planted roots in this quiet, safe and friendly small town.

HARD WORK

Jose Zacarias is among them. The 56-year-old moved to West Liberty from Mexico in 1984, working first in the turkey processing plant, a job he said was dirty, grueling and dangerous. By learning English, he was able to get better factory jobs. They were farther away, but Zacarias continued living in West Liberty.

He bought a big old farmhouse on the outskirts of West Liberty 20 years ago and raised three boys there. He called it and the two acres around him "a quiet piece of heaven" — until the new high school was built nearby a few years ago.

INITIAL FEARS

He considers many Anglos among his closest friends, and says the white and Hispanic communities in West Liberty get along well. But he says it wasn't always this way.

"When I arrived here in '84, they told me that such and such businessman wouldn't allow it, like for instance, the bar owners, wouldn't allow Mexican customers there, or they despise them openly, or things like that," Zacarias says.

But Zacarias and others in West Liberty say such conflicts gradually faded away, especially as Hispanics became more economically integrated into the community, and as the schools better integrated the community's children.

School with a WAITING LIST

The West Liberty school system has what was the first dual-language program in the state.

Students take all of their classes in both Spanish and English, switching from an English-language teacher in the morning to a Spanish-language teacher in the afternoon.

West Liberty Elementary School principal Nancy Gardner says the program is voluntary, with half of the spots reserved for kids who speak English primarily at home, and half for those who speak Spanish.

INTEGRATION

"And in the end, all the students then become bilingual, biliterate and bicultural," Gardner says.

The dual language program is now in its 14th year, and last spring graduated its first high school senior class of students who started as kindergartners.

The program is so successful, several Anglo families have moved to West Liberty from nearby Iowa City, Muscatine and other towns specifically to enroll their kids. The program, which now has a waiting list, is being duplicated in a handful of other Iowa school districts with growing Hispanic populations.

Read more from this source:  http://www.iowaimmigrationeducation.org/index.cfm?nodeID=19036&audienceID=1&action=display&newsID=15065

The Pitfalls of the California Dream Act.

                        Photo from http://peoplesworld.org/immigrant-youth-sit-in-at-ice/
What are the negative ramifications of the newly passed Dream Act of California, which promises a few illegal immigrants a small break in tuition costs at the state's higher education facilities?  Like most legislation, in order to get passed it usually ends up being done in piecemeal fashion - a step at a time. People usually are not ready for broad changes.  They come to accept it only by bits and pieces.  In order to have the anticipated goals achieved, the most acceptable facets, i.e. those parts which are the least politically damaging, get passed first, followed by corrections, amendments, adjustments, and expansions.  This piece of legislation is no exception as Esther Cepeda points out the shortfalls in the Janesville Gazette.

CHICAGO — Just hours after Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Dream Act, which will allow illegal immigrant students to be eligible for state-funded financial aid at public universities and community colleges, celebratory email began circulating..... though  this new development will surely cause more ire to be directed toward California's illegal immigrants. The legislation is terribly misleading to many constituencies, especially to the newly eligible students themselves.

The text of a news release on the governor's website said the law "allows top students who are on the path to citizenship to apply for college financial aid."

First, it does not confer citizenship. Given that there is little chance that either comprehensive immigration reform or piecemeal legislation such as the federal DREAM Act will be passed anytime soon -- such bills have been routinely shot down for 10 years and the current rage over immigration won't wane until long after the economy gets on track -- the "on the path to citizenship" bit is a tremendous overstatement. But it's one that certain interest groups want to hear because it pretends there is a national political momentum behind such moves.

The part about "top students" is a reach as well. California is extremely liberal with student tuition assistance and, even in the case of the so-called "competitive awards," students with grade point averages as low as 2.0 -- a "C" -- can qualify for money that never has to be paid back. It was probably included to make Californians feel better about the new beneficiaries of their tax dollars.

The truth is that such grants usually make a tiny dent in the costs of attending college. Even if a student goes to a community college, there is often a huge shortfall between the Cal Grant awards and the full cost of tuition, fees, books and living or transportation expenses so as to require student loans. And illegal immigrants aren't eligible for any kind of federal student aid.
But the costs are not the biggest point of contention -- truly resourceful students usually find ways to pay for college, and California estimates that only about 1 percent of all Cal Grant funds could potentially go to undocumented students.
Consider the stark realities of the situation. The bill was sold to Californians as a benefit to the state's pained tax base, and indeed, most states know what projected revenues can be assumed for every newly minted college graduate. In Illinois, it is estimated that within six years of a student enrolling in a community college, his or her income tax payments will grow by 70 percent compared to 7 percent for a low-income taxpayer who does not attend community college. Even students who don't graduate show major increases in income tax payments.
But illegal immigrants -- even those with hard-earned college degrees -- cannot legally work in California, or anywhere else, in this country.
It is nothing short of tragic that the very people who push in-state tuition or financial aid opportunities for illegal immigrants never mention the fact that unless a wide-ranging federal amnesty program is put into place, there are no career paths for these students.
No one ever talks about the untold number who made their way through college and are now older than 35, the cutoff stated in the version of the DREAM Act that was introduced in Congress last year. But they, like other undocumented college grads who can't access legitimate jobs in their chosen field of study, are out there, just scraping by.
And does anyone really want more graduates to join the ranks of desperate jobseekers? The September unemployment numbers said the national unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent, while California's rate is a painful 12.1 percent.
The California Dream Act isn't careful planning designed to give a boost to the state's illegal immigrants or benefit the general population -- and referendum papers to overturn the new law have already been filed. It is the mirror opposite of tactics other states are using to diminish illegal immigrant populations: feel-good legislation that only scores political points for politicians seeking re-election.

Obviously, this is a work in progress as many steps remain in order to make this a really workable solution.

See more of this source: http://gazettextra.com/news/2011/oct/13/california-bad-dreaming/

Becoming Legal: An Immigrant's Path to Citizenship

A short course on immigration in the USA:

1.  Anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new nor limited to our current affairs or just the U.S.:  all over the world immigrants are shunned and the outside ethnic group is always seen as inferior.  Just a few which come to mind:  Shiite and Sunni,  Japanese and Chinese, Kurds and Turks, Slavs and Croats, Romanians in Spain ( the Spanish gov. recently was offering them money to go back to Romania, if they promised to stay there for 5 yrs ! ), Catholic Irish vs. English Protestants, the Algerians in France etc.  In the US we have historically found groups that were easy to discriminate against:  Native Americans, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, and now Latinos.

    2. There is always an element of "otherness" commonly based on religion or skin color or language in the "outside" group.

    3.  Those in a position of influence ( talk show hosts, politicians, religious leaders, and in some cases even teachers) tend to take sides.  Those who exacerbate the dislike of the scapegoat, usually focus on the "otherness" and try to foment fear of the unknown.  Most people naturally have certain fears of that which is outside their comfort zone, their realm of familiarity.  So, this is an easy way to persuade the populace of the demons in "those people."   We hear terms like "the axis of evil," and "They are either for us, or against us." or "They are taking away our jobs."  This is a common one in our current financially stressful world.

    4.  With the passage of time, at least in the US, our "social mind-set" or popular image softens toward many of our formerly disliked groups.  Think of the changes we have seen in attitudes in our lifetime toward, say, African Americans, Japanese, and the Vietnamese.  These changes come slowly, with influence makers and moms in sneakers speaking out. 

    5.  Seeing the above pattern repeat itself several times in our lives, we now are much more skeptical of accepting the initial demagoguery.

    6.  Based on our own experiences and observations, we have found the hispanics we have met here in the US and Latin America, mostly genuine, generous, hard-working people, who are trying to make the best of their lives.  The newly emigrated are leaving poverty, violence and corruption, looking for a new beginning, a second chance.  When we recently read in an internet forum a comment from a woman who described herself as a conservative, born again Christian who thought that all Mexicans should be deported, what came to mind was that the essence of both Christianity and immigration is a second chance, a new beginning, an opportunity to start fresh.  She obviously saw life differently from us.

    7.  Attempts to force immigrants out of our communities have repeatedly proven unworkable.  The resulting economic impact is disastrous to those on both sides of the tracks.  The citizen farmers and small business owners find themselves without customers and workers.  The immigrants, both legal and illegal, have their lives and families thrown into chaos.  For some, this may be the goal.  For us, it is unfathomable.

    8.  So, indeed, we would favor changing our laws to provide a path to citizenship.  Perhaps fines may be a part of the equation, but few will be able to pay them.  If it is found that back taxes are owed, certainly employers would be required to pay their portions, along with penalties and interest.  We think that it will be nearly impossible to find small business employers who have relied in the past on undocumented workers, now willing to step up and pay these back taxes, fines and interest.  Hence, "making up for the past" is a difficult part of the solution.  Criminal records should be examined and not allowed for violent crimes.  Service to the country (USA) in the form of work in the Peace Corps, Americorps etc would be a good thing.  Basic English proficiency should be required, as well as knowledge of our governmental system.  We see this not as amnesty.  Rather it represents a means of earning a way into our system.  In the early days of our country, many people earned their way in - as indentured servants.  When they could not pay for their passage across the ocean, they "borrowed" the money from a landowner already living in this country, then worked for that owner for five to seven years without pay.  Hence, working to achieve legal status and citizenship in the US is nothing new.

Anti-Latino Racism Slams CNN National News Desk Editor

Nick Valencia is a national news desk editor and former head of the CNN Spanish Desk.  He's a third-generation American citizen recently confronted by racist comments coming from a hate filled woman in Georgia:

Atlanta (CNN) -- "Go home!" she yelled at me. "Why don't you go back home to Mexico before you ruin this country like you ruined your own!"
I was standing in a crowd at the Music Midtown festival in Atlanta, where I live. A few minutes earlier I'd met a group of five people who'd been standing in front of me -- here from Mexico City -- and I had begun speaking Spanish with them.
Atlanta has a growing Latino community, and I am actively involved. Whenever I get the chance to speak to someone in Spanish here, I introduce myself. My new acquaintances and I were talking about what a great time we were having and how remarkable the city of Atlanta was for bringing back the festival to Piedmont Park.
And that's when I heard the yelling woman next to me. As if "go home" wasn't clear enough, the woman -- a 20-something Caucasian -- repeated the words in Spanish.
"Vete!"
I froze. I didn't quite know what to say, and I didn't want to believe she was talking to me or the group of people I had just met.

Nick Valencia

As a third-generation Mexican-American growing up in Los Angeles, I had never encountered such overt racism. In fact, because my family was long since assimilated, among my Latino friends I was always considered the "pocho" or "white boy" of the group. (As I write this, a part of me knows somewhere in L.A., a friend of mine will be proud to know someone actually considered me Mexican enough to yell "go home" at me.)
My Mexican friends remind me that I am American first, Mexican second and that my English is better than my Spanish.
"Yes," I tell them. "But I can never walk into a room and be white."
Evidently, to some the brown color of my skin means I'm not even American. My friends and family tell me what I experienced that night is a microcosm of what is happening to Latinos across the country. You don't have to look hard to find it. In news stories, in political discourse, on talk radio, in everyday conversation it seems it has become OK to treat Latinos in a negative and antagonistic way -- whether they are new immigrants or longtime Americans. The anti-immigration legislation sweeping across the United States has made this plain. People in my Latino networks say they've noticed the change. And now I understand what they mean.
Like many Americans whose grandparents or parents came here from somewhere else, I live at the intersection of my two cultures. I eat tacos, but I love cheeseburgers. I go salsa dancing, and listen to rock n' roll. I speak Spanish and English, and depending on the crowd, sometimes Spanglish. I love my country and my cultural community. My duality is my reality, just like the 50 million other Latinos in the United States.
I have been luckier than many. Before this incident, the closest I'd ever come to blatant racism was in junior high. I was in the jazz band and played first trumpet. One day our jazz band teacher invited in his predecessor, a local legend who had made Eagle Rock High School's jazz program famous in the 1980s.
The visiting instructor pointed me out and asked me to play him 16 bars of music. I did, but he quickly interrupted.
"Stop, stop, stop. I don't want to hear any of that mariachi music. This is jazz."
I didn't think anything of it. Instead I felt terrible that the legend standing in front of me didn't think I was good enough. I went home that night, and like every night, at 6:30 p.m. my family sat down for dinner to talk about our day.
"How was your day, Nicky?" my dad asked.
So I told him. Outraged, the next day he went to my principal and filed a formal complaint. The legend didn't come back to visit the jazz program again. Weeks later we received a letter in the mail from him apologizing for his insensitive comments. My family saved the letter.
My father was hypersensitive to ethnic identity and deeply proud of his Latino heritage. The son of a naturalized immigrant from El Salvador and a Mexican mother from Texas, he grew up in Los Angeles during a time of racial tension. When I was young he would tell me stories of the race riots in his high school, violence against people of color, and awful accounts of the struggle he had to make it as a Mexican-American teen in the 1960s.
He died when I was 17 years old, but one of the phrases he implanted in my mind before he passed was a statement activist Cesar Chavez made famous:
"Si se puede" -- "Yes you can."
And now, here I was, at 28, with this stranger yelling at me to "leave." I stood there in the middle of a damp crowd on a late Atlanta evening, not comprehending, the wind still and the vibrations of Coldplay's "Yellow" filling the space in the air.
I didn't say a thing.
I didn't have to.
The crowd around us looked in amazement at this woman. Some of them spoke up to her, telling her she was wrong to talk to us like that. The group of people from Mexico City looked at her in disgust and, realizing from the look on my face that I must not be accustomed to what I was hearing, they turned toward me to offer support.
One of them, a young man, grabbed my hand and raised it high in the air.
"Estamos aqui," he said, which translates to "We are here."
It was the "Si se puede" moment.
The woman continued to taunt us for some minutes, but when we did not reciprocate her hatred, she stopped.
The band played a few more songs before ending the set, and the crowd dispersed across the park into the Saturday evening.
As I walked away, the woman and I locked eyes.
"I don't think you understand who you said that to," I told her. Thinking to myself, I am as American as you are.
"What," she said laughing. "Are you some kind of celebrity or something?"
No. But like the Mexicans I was standing with, I am a human being. And I am home.

See more at:  source

New Alabama Law: Crops rot in the field

Nueva ley de inmigración de Alabama.  Es el más severa de los EEUU.  Los partidarios dicen que la norma debe producir más trabajo para los ciudadanos mientras que las voces criticas aseguran que saca los derechos civiles. Pero la cosecha se pudre en los campos y los agricultores no pueden encontrar trabajadores suficientes para cosechar, porque la mayoría de los trabajadores - legales y sin papeles - han salido los trabajos y han huido.  Tambien, los administradores de cárceles se preocupan que no tienen espacio ni capacidad para detener más personas.

New immigration law in Alabama.  It's the most severe in the US.  Supporters say that the rule should produce more work for citizens while critics claim that it robs some of civil rights.  But food is rotting in the fields and farmers are unable to find sufficient workers to harvest their crops, since most of the workers have left their jobs and departed from the area.  Jail administrators are also concerned since they don't have the capacity to hold detainees.

What Have We Learned About Immigration? Is it time for Comprehensive Reform?

Recently, a friend asked us what we really thought about immigration.  With some reflection, we put our thoughts together in the following reply:

    A few years ago we began trying to educate ourselves on the issue, visiting our local immigration prison, which is owned and operated by a private corporation, the GEO Group.  We were bothered by the idea of people making a profit from rounding up and incarcerating others.  This seemed to us like something that should only be done by the government, if it had to be done at all.  We had a vague idea that somehow the profit motive likely would creep into the mix in a way that was not good.  Some investigation turned up that the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America, both privately owned corporations, were spending mega bucks lobbying to get anti-immigration laws passed in several states including Arizona, Utah and Alabama and So. Carolina.  Why would they do this?  Because they want to fill their rooms at close to $200 per nite, just like any good business.  With more stringent laws against immigrants, more customers would come.  Of course, they couldn't come out and say this.  What we have seen is an increase in messages about immigrants taking our jobs, not paying taxes, depleting social services, adding to our crime rates etc.

   So, we started reading more on the issue, spent some time working with a local Latino service organization, took workshops, and finally started this blog last May with the idea of looking at the problem from several points of view.

Through all of this we have drawn some conclusions:

    1.  Anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new nor limited to our current affairs or just the U.S.:  all over the world immigrants are shunned and the outside ethnic group is always seen as inferior.  Just a few which come to mind:  Shiite and Sunni,  Japanese and Chinese, Kurds and Turks, Slavs and Croats, Romanians in Spain ( the Spanish gov. recently was offering them money to go back to Romania, if they promised to stay there for 5 yrs ! ), Catholic Irish vs. English Protestants, the Algerians in France etc.  In the US we have historically found groups that were easy to discriminate against:  Native Americans, Italians, Germans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, and now Latinos.

    2. There is always an element of "otherness" commonly based on religion or skin color or language in the "outside" group.

    3.  Those in a position of influence ( talk show hosts, politicians, religious leaders, and in some cases even teachers) tend to take sides.  Those who exacerbate the dislike of the scapegoat, usually focus on the "otherness" and try to foment fear of the unknown.  Most people naturally have certain fears of that which is outside their comfort zone, their realm of familiarity.  So, this is an easy way to persuade the populace of the demons in "those people."   We hear terms like "the axis of evil," and "They are either for us, or against us." or "They are taking away our jobs."  This is a common one in our current financially stressful world.

    4.  With the passage of time, at least in the US, our "social mind-set" or popular image softens toward many of our formerly disliked groups.  Think of the changes we have seen in attitudes in our lifetime toward, say, African Americans, Japanese, and the Vietnamese.  These changes come slowly, with influence makers and moms in sneakers speaking out. 

    5.  Seeing the above pattern repeat itself several times in our lives, we now are much more skeptical of accepting the initial demagoguery.

    6.  Based on our own experiences and observations, we have found the Mexicans we have met here in the US and Mexico, mostly genuine, generous, hard-working people, who are trying to make the best of their lives.  The newly emigrated are leaving poverty, violence and corruption, looking for a new beginning, a second chance.  When we recently read in an internet forum a comment from a woman who described herself as a conservative, born again Christian who thought that all Mexicans should be deported, what came to mind was that the essence of both Christianity and immigration is a second chance, a new beginning, an opportunity to start fresh.  She obviously saw life differently from us.
    7.  Attempts to force immigrants out of our communities has proven repeatedly unworkable.  The resulting economic impact is disastrous to those who pass such legislation.  The immigrants, both legal and illegal, have their lives and families thrown into chaos.  For some, this may be the goal.  For us, it is unfathomable.

    8.  So, indeed, we would favor changing our laws to provide a path to citizenship.  Perhaps fines may be a part of the equation, but few will be able to pay them.  If it is found that back taxes are owed, certainly employers would be required to pay their portions, along with penalties and interest.  We think that it will be nearly impossible to find small business employers who have relied in the past on undocumented workers, now willing to step up and pay these back taxes, fines and interest.  Hence, "making up for the past" is a difficult part of the solution.  Criminal records should be examined and not allowed for violent crimes.  Service to the country (USA) in the form of work in the Peace Corps, Americore etc would be a good thing.  Basic English proficiency should be required, as well as knowledge of our governmental system.  We see this not as amnesty.  Rather it represents a means of earning a way into our system.  In the early days of our country, many people earned their way in - as indentured servants.  When they could not pay for their passage across the ocean, they "borrowed" the money from a landowner already living in this country, then worked for that owner for five to seven years without pay.

HISTORY OF IMMIGRATION IN USA 
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States )

1630 to 1830
The peak New England settlement occurred from about 1629 to about 1641 when about 20,000 Puritan settlers arrived.   In the next 150 years, their  descendants largely filled in the New England states and parts of upstate New York.
While the 13 colonies had differences in detail, they had many things in common. Nearly all were settled and financed by privately organized groups of English settlers or families using private free enterprise without any significant English Royal or Parliamentary government support or input.
They nearly all established their own popularly elected governments and courts on as many levels as they could and were nearly all, within a few years, mostly armed, self governing, self supporting and self replicating. This self ruling pattern became so ingrained that almost all new settlements by one or more groups of settlers would have their own government up and running shortly after they settled down for the next 200 years. Nearly all, after a hundred years plus of living together, had learned to tolerate other religions than their own.
Nearly all colonies and later, states in the United States, were settled by migration from another colony or state, as foreign immigration usually only played a minor role after the initial settlements were started. Many new immigrants did end up on the frontiers as that was where the land was usually the cheapest.
Although Spain set up a few forts in Florida, notably San Agustín (present-day Saint Augustine) in 1565, they sent few settlers. Spaniards moving north from Mexico founded the San Juan on the Rio Grande in 1598, and Santa Fe in 1607-1608.
There was relatively little immigration from 1770 to 1830; indeed there was significant outmigration to Canada, including about 75,000 Loyalists as well as Germans and other looking for better farms in what is now Ontario.  Nearly all population growth up to 1830 was by internal increase; about 98.5% of the population was native-born.  Large scale immigration resumed in the 1830s from Britain, Ireland, Germany and other parts of western Europe.
1830
Between 1831 and 1840, immigration more than quadrupled to a total of 599,000. These included about 207,000 Irish, starting to emigrate in large numbers following Britain's easing of travel restrictions, and about 152,000 Germans, 76,000 British, and 46,000 French, constituting the next largest immigrant groups of the decade.
Between 1841 and 1850, immigration nearly tripled again , totaling 1,713,000 immigrants, including at least 781,000 Irish, 435,000 Germans, 267,000 British and 77,000 French immigrants.
By 1850, this had shifted to about 90% native-born. The first significant Catholic immigration started in the mid 1840s, shifting the population from about 95% Protestant down to about 90% by 1850.
In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, concluding the Mexican War, extended U.S. citizenship to approximately 60,000 Mexican residents of the New Mexico Territory and 10,000 living in California. An additional approximate 2,500 foreign born California residents also become U.S. citizens.
In 1849, the California Gold Rush brought in over 100,000 would-be miners from the eastern U.S., Latin America, China, Australia, and Europe.

1870

After 1870 steam powered larger and faster ships, with lower fares. Meanwhile farming improvements in southern and eastern Europe created surplus populations that needed to move on. As usual, young people age 15 to 30 predominated among the newcomers. This wave of migration, which constituted the third episode in the history of U.S. immigration, could better be referred to as a flood of immigrants, as nearly 25 million Europeans made the voyage. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 4 million Jews.
Anti Immigration
Their urban destinations, their numbers, and perhaps an antipathy towards foreigners led to the emergence of a second wave of organized xenophobia. By the 1890s, many Americans, particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, native-born, considered immigration to pose a serious danger to the nation’s health and security. In 1893 a group of them formed the Immigration Restriction League, and it, along with other similarly inclined organizations, began to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration.

Irish and German Catholic immigration was opposed in the 1850s by the Nativist/Know Nothing movement, originating in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Catholic immigrants , who were often regarded as hostile to American values and controlled by the Pope in Rome.

Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, some states started to pass their own immigration laws, which prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in 1875 that immigration was a federal responsibility.^[26] In 1875, the nation passed its first immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, also known as the Asian Exclusion Act, outlawing the importation of unwilling Chinese women for sex slavery.^[27]
The Dillingham Commission was instituted by the United States Congress in 1907 to investigate the effects of immigration on the country. The Commission's analysis of American immigration during the previous three decades led it to conclude that the major source of immigration had shifted from northern and western Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans.   The 1910s marked the high point of Italian immigration to the United States. Over two million Italians immigrated in those years, with a total of 5.3 million between 1880 and 1920.
About 1.5 million Swedes and Norwegians immigrated to the United States within this period, due to opportunity in America and poverty and religious oppression in united Sweden-Norway.
Over two million Eastern Europeans, mainly Catholics and Jews, immigrated between 1880 and 1924.  People of Polish ancestry are the largest Eastern European ancestry group in the United States.
Congress passed a literacy requirement in 1917 to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from entering the country.
Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s.  In 1924  quotas were set for European immigrants so that no more than 2% of the 1890 immigrant stocks were allowed into America.
Restriction proceeded piecemeal over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but immediately after the end of World War I (1914-1918) and into the early 1920s, Congress did change the nation’s basic policy about immigration. The National Origins Formula of 1921 (and its final form in 1924) not only restricted the number of immigrants who might enter the United States but also assigned slots according to quotas based on national origins. A complicated piece of legislation, it essentially gave preference to immigrants from northern and western Europe, severely limited the numbers from eastern and southern Europe, and declared all potential immigrants from Asia to be unworthy of entry into the United States.
The legislation excluded the Western Hemisphere from the quota system, and the 1920s ushered in the penultimate era in U.S. immigration history. Immigrants could and did move quite freely from Mexico, the Caribbean (including Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti), and other parts of Central and South America. This era, which reflected the application of the 1924 legislation, lasted until 1965.
In 1952, the McCarran Walter Immigration Act affirmed the national-origins quota system of 1924 and limited total annual immigration to one-sixth of one percent of the population of the continental United States in 1920, or 175,455. The act exempted spouses and children of U.S. citizens and people born in the Western Hemisphere from the quota.
In 1954, Operation Wetback forced the return of thousands of illegal immigrants to Mexico. [4]. Between 1944 and 1954, "the decade of the wetback," the number of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico increased by 6,000 percent. It is estimated that, in 1954, before Operation Wetback got under way, more than a million workers had crossed the Rio Grande illegally.
It is difficult to estimate the number of illegal immigrants that left due to the operation—most voluntarily. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The program was ultimately abandoned due to questions surrounding the ethics of its implementation. Citizens of Mexican descent complained of police stopping all "Mexican looking" people and utilizing extreme “police-state” methods including deportation of American-born children who by law were citizens.^[40]
In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed, creating, for the first time, penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants. IRCA, as proposed in Congress, was projected to give amnesty to about 1,000,000 workers in the country illegally. In practice, amnesty for about 3,000,000 immigrants already in the United States was granted. Most were from Mexico. Legal Mexican immigrant family numbers were 2,198,000 in 1980, 4,289,000 in 1990 (includes IRCA) and 7,841,000 in 2000.

SOME CURRENT ARGUMENTS ABOUT IMMIGRATION

(Source: Immigration Policy Center: 

Fuzzy Math: The Anti-Immigration Arguments of NumbersUSA Don't Add Up

According to the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, immigration to the United States is all about arithmetic: immigration increases the U.S. population, and more people presumably means more pollution, more urban sprawl, more competition for jobs, and higher taxes for Americans who must shoulder the costs of “over-population.”  At first glance, this argument is attractive in its simplicity: less immigration, fewer people, a better environment, more jobs, lower taxes. However, as with so many simple arguments about complex topics, it is fundamentally flawed and misses the point.  “Over-population” is not the primary cause of the environmental or economic woes facing the United States, so arbitrary restrictions on immigration will not create a cleaner environment or a healthier economy.

Environment

• According to the World Resources Institute, the United States is home to 23% fewer people than the European nations of the EU-15, yet produced 70% more greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as of 2000.

• Environmental degradation is caused by a host of factors unrelated to population size, such as the degree to which a society depends upon polluting and non-renewable fossil fuels; utilizes pollution-reduction technologies; develops systems of mass transit to minimize individual automobile use; uses plastics and other non-biodegradable materials in manufacturing and packaging consumer goods; recycles potentially recyclable materials; and controls agricultural run-off into waterways.

• A few people can pollute a lot, or a lot of people can pollute a little, depending on the systems of production and consumption within a society.  The problem is less about how many people are in the United States, and more about how the United States produces and consumes.

Economy:

• NumbersUSA argues that immigration imposes a financial burden on U.S. taxpayers because most immigrants earn relatively low wages and therefore don’t pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of the public benefits and services they receive.
• This argument is based on a narrow and misleading fiscal snapshot of how much the health and educational services utilized by immigrants and their children—even those born in the United States—“cost” in comparison to the taxes they pay at a single point in time. In reality, the income levels and tax contributions of immigrants tend to increase over time, and all children are “costly” when they are still in school and not yet working, tax-paying adults.  A more accurate fiscal analysis would estimate how much immigrants and their children pay in taxes and utilize in public services over their lifetimes.
• Even a lifetime fiscal accounting does not capture the many other economic contributions that workers—both immigrant and native-born—make through their consumer purchasing power and formation of new businesses, both of which increase the nation’s economic output, create jobs, and provide federal, state, and local governments with additional revenue through sales, income, business, and property taxes.
• Because it ignores the many economic contributions that workers make over their lifetimes, the one-year fiscal snapshot favored by NumbersUSA would also incorrectly portray the more than 32 million native-born Americans who live below the federal poverty line, as well as nearly all native-born retirees, as a net “burden” on U.S. taxpayers.

Immigrants Don’t “Steal” Jobs

• NumbersUSA portrays immigrant workers as little more than job competition for native-born workers.  In truth, most immigrants are not competing with most natives for the same jobs.
• Immigrants tend to have either very little education or a great deal of education, while most natives fall somewhere in the middle of the educational spectrum, which means they are filling different niches in the labor force.  As a result, immigrants usually complement the native-born workforce—which increases the productivity, and therefore the wages, of natives.
• A 2006 study by economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California-Davis found that, between 1990 and 2004, the roughly 90% of native-born workers with at least a high-school diploma experienced wage gains because of immigration that ranged from 0.7% to 3.4%, depending on their level of education.
• A May 2009 report by Rob Paral & Associates demonstrates that, even in the midst of the current economic recession, there is no correlation between the presence of immigrants in the labor market of a particular locale and the unemployment rate among native-born whites, blacks, Latinos, or Asians.
• The reliance of the U.S. economy upon immigrant workers is unlikely to diminish in the coming decades given the seriousness of the “aging” crisis precipitated by the impending retirement of the Baby Boom generation.
• A 2008 report by demographer Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California estimates that the ratio of seniors (age 65 and older) to working-age adults (25 to 64) will increase by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030. Immigrants, who tend to be younger than natives, will be increasingly important as workers, taxpayers, and homebuyers.

Taxes and State Services

.   1.    I have a friend who is an employer, currently looking to hire someone.

    2.    If he hires someone “above board,” paying all taxes, it will cost him  $ 15 per hour after collecting the taxes from the employee, adding the employer's portion of the taxes and sending them to the government.  ( This is the only legal way to do it.)

    3.    If he hires a legal citizen “under the table” without sending any taxes to the government, he might get the same work done for $ 11 per hour.  For various reasons many citizens prefer this.

    4.    If he hires an illegal immigrant he might get the work done for $ 8 per hour.

    5.    What then is the value of the work?  Those who argue that illegals are “stealing our jobs” would have to say that the value is $15 per hour since that is what they see as the loss to their income.  The government would agree.

    6.    In a quid pro quo equation there are two parts:  the worker gives an hour of time; the employer gives $15.

    7.    BUT when an illegal gives his hour of time and the employer only gives up $8, who is shorting the system (State of Calif., for instance) causing the state to go bankrupt?  It's not the immigrant and his kids who are draining the system dry. 

       Now, if all the farmers, business owners and homeowners who have hired someone to do their gardening would just pay back all the money they have pocketed by paying immigrants below the prevailing wages, plus interest and penalties, the state system would be solvent.  The real moral question is, "Who has stolen the money from the state?"

    8.    For a good book that illustrates this concept of thinking deeper, asking the right questions, look at the #1 best seller Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner.