Your textbook offers an analysis of a number of contentious immigration issues currently debated in the United States (page 84). Do new immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers too much money? Do immigrants take jobs away from U.S. citizens? Are too many immigrants being admitted into the United States? Given the contentious nature of the debate over immigration in the United States, the Internet is also full of sites chiming in on both sides of the issue. Sites advocating reduced immigration, or the closing of America’s borders altogether, include the Center for Immigration Studies , U.S. Border Control , the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and ProjectUSA.

One way to start making better sense of the debate is to explore the Migration Policy Institute’s web site, where a great array of data, tools, and reports are available about immigration in the United States and around the world. For example, the MPI offers a " US In Focus" site, which gathers reports and data focusing on the United States. Here, you can examine maps of the U.S. foreign-born population, age-sex pyramids of U.S. immigrants, state-by-state data, and many other data tools for building a comprehensive picture of immigration in the United States. For a recent estimate of Mexican immigration to the United States, see this report by Jeffrey Passel. For a report on Mexican immigrants in the US labor force, see the report by Elizabeth Grieco and Brian Ray.

Immigrants and the demand for labor in the US: What is clear in Grieco and Ray’s report is that despite the strong anti-immigration opinions voiced by some groups in the United States, there remains great demand for labor, and particularly cheap labor, throughout the United States. Immigrants have long served a vital role in helping localities throughout the United States meet their labor needs, as agricultural workers, low-paid service workers, and semi-skilled factory workers. For many agricultural areas of the United States, immigrants have long played a crucial role in meeting the labor-intensive demands of the agricultural and food-processing industries. For instance, read this New York Times article on the U.S. meatpacking industry's dependence on immigrant labor. It can also be found on the Web site of Poultry.org , a farm animal rights group.

President George W. Bush, in recognition of the importance that immigration continues to play for the health of the U.S. economy, as well as maintaining good relations between the United States and Mexico, has proposed a Mexican guest-worker program in which migrants from Mexico would be issued temporary work permits. Bush’s proposal has been viewed by some as a response to pressure from some US businesses to ease restrictions on immigration.

Like President Bush, the need for a continuing influx of labor was apparently on the mind of the Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, whose state has faced an exodus of labor (people leaving depressed rural communities for better paying opportunities in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, or St. Louis). In 2001, the governor proposed a strategy to encourage immigration into the state, which sparked a small controversy and became an issue in Vilsack’s re-election campaign (he won the re-election). See this Washington Post article on the controversy the governor's strategy caused. See also the governor's letter to the editor in response to the article. You can use the MPI’s state-by-state data page to access the latest immigration statistics for Iowa.

ProjectUSA, a political action group that actively resists immigration, took particular interest in the Iowa case. While their web page devoted to the Iowa case is no longer online, you can read about their involvement in anti-immigration petitions in this article about the case in the Des Moines Register. You can also view some of the ProjectUSA archives of the controversy by conducting a search on the name Vilsack or Iowa. In addition, you can listen to an audio webcast interview with the Iowa governor on National Public Radio. Finally, you can read an opinion column from Grinnell College's newspaper supporting the governor's plan (Grinnell is located in Iowa). After examining these materials, and after again reviewing your textbook's material on immigration in North America, consider these questions:

Immigration and the "browning" of America. Beyond the economic dimensions of the debate over immigration in the United States, there are also cultural issues that have been raised in relation to the increasing proportion of Hispanics in the U.S. population. Again IPM offers some basic data on this trend. See, for example, the map of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. Other useful data include a graphic of the U.S. foreign-born population by region of birth, 1960–2000 and the size of the foreign-born population relative to U.S. population since 1850. USA Today also offers a set of graphics on the U.S. Hispanic population based on 2000 census data.

One outspoken critic of this trend in Hispanic migration has been Samuel Huntington, who in an article in Foreign Policy magazine argued that immigrants from Latin America have not become integrated into mainstream American society and that "the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages." His argument has also incited numerous rebuttals, published in Foreign Policy (to view the Foreign Policy sites, free registration is required). This debate over the assimilation of recent immigrants–along with additional views on the debate from The Economist, Newsweek, Business Week and Time Magazines–is also featured in the PBS online resources for the film Farmingville. The site also includes a general resource page on Hispanic immigration in the US. The PBS site’s synopsis of Farmingville is itself of good introduction to the key issues in the debate, as well as a revealing testimony of the conflicts–in this case violence and hatred–that arise in some communities in which immigration has brought rapid change.