I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood and am married to an immigrant. My grandmother was an immigrant. The problem is that the numbers today are so large, we can’t assimilate them. And since they are mostly Hispanic, a critical mass is being reached where the immigrants are demanding that we accommodate our culture, language, etc. to their’s instead of the other way around. And there is also the political dimension since 87% of the 1.2 million legal immigrants who enter annually are minorities, as defined by the USG. Immigrants and minorities vote predominantly Democrat.
Immigrants and minority voters vote Democrat, in large part (and I know this because they’ve told me) because of the sort of blanket anti-minority and anti-immigrant sentiments that one can see expressed here and other right-wing web sites, on some right-wing talk radio stations, and by some right-wing politicians. Having Jesse Helms sing “Dixie” to Carol Moseley-Braun, for example, is the sort of thing that costs Republicans minority votes, no matter how much I disliked Moseley-Braun or how reliably conservative Helms was and it also cements the image of southern whites and things like the Confederate flag as inherently racist in the minds of minorities. A lot of minorities and immigrants are socially conservative and even fully conservative and I have black friends who vote Republican. But if we want larger numbers, we’ve got to knock off letting the snide and bigoted remarks pass as normal discourse on the right.