Not only the immigrants' kids put a strain on the social welfare system; just think of the displaced AMERICAN workers and those that work for less wages than they used to because of illigals. They will be turning to the system as well. I work in a grocery store and I see more and more people who would never be caught dead using food stamps in the past using them now. These are not dead beats by any streach of the imagination. They work, but just no longer make enough money to make ends meet.
Another thing that I laugh at is the oft used statement that "they are taking jobs that no one else wants." Well I say that when you take a gander at the level of education that kids coming out of the schools today have, about the only thing many of them are qualified to do are these "jobs that no one wants." Folks, let's face it, not everyone is cut out to be an engineer or a doctor, or to have some IT job. Just because they don't have the mental capacity to learn to do these types of high level jobs doesn't mean they are not good people and hard workers, and I don't think they deserve to be subjected to a life of abject poverty or a ward of the state. The presence of illigal aliens are driving down the wages in these low skill sectors to the point that that is the future they face. This is a sure fire formula to much civil strife and even civil war.
At least up til fifteen years ago, most of the jobs that are currently heavily (if not exclusively) worked by Mexicans were worked primarily by blacks and whites. Many of them high school kids. Yard workers, grocery grunts, burger types, construction/road crews. This is the kind of stuff that I and all my friends (white kids all) did from early teens to early twenties.
Sometime in the past fifteen years, whites around here have stopped expecting their kids to work. It's possible to go weeks at a time without seeing a white kid doing the jobs in that stratum of employment. Why did they stop? They want a better life for their kids, so they don't make them stoop to the dirty work? Or, the Mexicans have driven down wages to the extent that whites won't work for so little. Hard to say, because if you travel in PA, WI, MN, and IA, for example, mostly it's white kids doing that work. Maybe not the construction, that's more adults. Whatever the case, it's become a perpetuating cycle in Texas. Because when the white kids stopped working, the Mexicans stepped in. And now there's one entire generation, maybe two, of white kids who have never seen white kids doing that work. It's "what Mexicans do."
So Mexicans do the work. And they will live fifteen people to an apartment, drive without insurance, shop at garage sales, get free health care and education. Very low overhead lifestyles. They live like that and get paid something like the equivalent of $50/hr (if we were to crash some border and do the same in another, more prosperous country). Plenty of money sent back to Mexico every Friday.
And this is where it starts getting really sticky sociologically, which you alluded to. Now we have in our society a group of people who literally are the lower class (with all the political implications that the lower class entails) and they are a distinct ethnic group. This cannot be a good thing. As the flow of immigrants is so high, and the motivation to assimilate is almost nil around here, there are just huge enclaves of "low class people of mestizo heritage" growing in the midst of all the whites whom they essentially serve as slaves. Very dicey.