[garbanzo]

It's almost as if we learn nothing from history - you had plenty of Italians and Irish and Polish who didn't speak English. Most of them learned some - their children were often bilingual and their grandchildren had no clue how to speak their ancestral tongue. Much the same is happening here as noted above.

[FITZ]

Notice the welfare graph in the 90's ---the so-called decade of prosperity. We've only got markedly increasing welfare rates ---how can we be bringing in millions of more indigent people when we already have so many? When the Irish and Germans came, they had to work, there was no free health care or food stamp program for them to get on. There was also plenty of land to homestead ---that's gone now. So are all those jobs NAFTA took out of the country.

[FITZ]

That graph doesn't show the level of welfare spending in the 1860's when the other immigrants came. But the 90s show a marked increase ---it would be interesting to know how it correlates with immigration levels (1986 general amnesty of over 3 million people who then brought in their elderly parents, aunts, uncles, children who "needed" health care etc).