[curiosity]

I find this somewhat alarming.

It we're not careful, we could see a proliferation of the sorts of shanty towns that are so ubiquitous to Latin America.

These shanty towns were created by poor people moving from the coutryside to the large cities looking for work. They had literally nothing, so they could not afford to even rent in the cheapest neighborhoods in the cities. Thus they constructed for themselves shanties on the outskirts, typically squatting on government land or private land whose owners were away.

If we're not careful, and don't enforce our immigration laws, the same thing could start happening here.

[Clemenza]

We had shanty towns in the US until through the early 20th century, even before the depression (there was a large one between US 1 and the railroad tracks in my dad's hometown of Newark through the 1930s). Hell, Central Park was once a shanty town filled with itinerant Irish in the mid 19th century.