Imagine that in Mexico you’ve heard the stories from your cousin, your brother-in-law, or the neighbor’s son about how much better life is in the North. “The streets in America are paved with gold,” they say. “Come on up!” If you can’t get here by legal means, how would you plan to cross the border?

The best way would be to get yourself a tourist visa and merely stay on when it expires. More than half of those without documentation come over that way. If you don’t mind waiting up to a year, negotiating your way through miles of red...

For some employers, having access to a vast pool of workers who have no recourse to legal protection must seem like a godsend, but it’s more like a pact with the devil. It’s unethical, as well as illegal; unfair to companies that would prefer to compete honestly; and unfair to American workers who deserve fair wages. Contractors, restaurants, megafarms, and factories—all are hiring hordes of workers who are often mistreated, underpaid, ill-housed, and placed at risk, afraid to complain for fear of deportation.

Those who get even the lowest pay here, however, may find themselves earning in one day...

What are they like, these newcomers who have come to live, illegally, among us? Those who make the journey across our southern borders generally fall into two groups. In the first group are young men who seek adventure, as well as the chance to send money to their families and save some up for themselves. For them it’s a rite of passage. The second group, smaller but growing fast, consists of older people, mostly men, who bring along their families or hope to send for them later. Whatever their category, the goal of essentially all of them is to find...

When labor contractor Maria García and her family brought Mexican workers from Arizona to rural western New York State, they did more than enslave them. They also forced more than thirty of them to live in a single farmhouse, where eleven workers shared three beds in one room. Perhaps the García story is an extreme case, but there are other accounts of similar substandard housing. David K. Shipler describes a migrant camp in North Carolina: “There, in a weedy lot less than twenty feet from where Thanksgiving yams were grown stood the building, as dismal as a neglected barn. Long...

While some states are looking for ways to reduce the numbers of those arriving illegally, at the same time virtually all of them have offices dedicated to dealing with the newcomers already here, as do many communities. In North Carolina, for example, its Children’s Services Division works to educate social workers about “the growing number of Latinos [who] are calling North Carolina home.” It urges child welfare workers, rather than adding to the pressure of adaptation, to learn about their culture and “find out how they have traditionally solved problems.”¹

Although many communities are striving to face the challenges, there...

Americans, says Gary Althen in his bookAmerican Ways, “believe firmly in what they call ‘the rule of law.’”¹ But to which law do they refer? Federal, state, city? Immigration has added a new dimension to the usual conflicts. Enforcement of immigration laws has always been considered almost exclusively a federal prerogative, but now, given what they see as the lack of response from Washington, communities throughout the country have sought their own solutions to what polls indicate is a major concern. The immigration problem has created a new “civil war,” and although this conflict doesn’t pit brother against brother,²...

According to Carlos Martinez, who left Mexico ten years ago for a better life in the States, immigration is part of nature’s plan. “People are always looking for something better,” he says, beginning with the first humans to leave their African homeland. It is a good and natural thing, he thinks, because we can learn from one another. As Jared Diamond so compellingly argues in his bookGuns, Germs, and Steel, for better or worse, we would not have the life we know today if our forebears had not strayed from home, since “the history of interactions among disparate peoples...

The Honorable Remedios Gómez-Arnau is consul general for the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, all of which have seen their Hispanic populations at least quadruple in the last decade. If federal immigration agents are correct in their estimates, Mississippi has gone from an estimated 2,000 illegal immigrants in 1990 to between 90,000 and 100,000 today.¹ With her light brown hair, slender and stylishly dressed in a camel skirt, black sweater set, and tan boots, the consul bears little physical resemblance to the smaller, darker people gathered outside her offices in Atlanta. The parking lot is full of the...

“Lisa Martinez” is one of many illegal immigrants who “reap few benefits,” and who face “low wages, long hours, grueling conditions and paying kickbacks…. It’s not unusual, for instance, for factory workers to flip-flop weeks between night and day shifts, or for employers to require workers to put in unpaid overtime…. Martinez has held 13 jobs in 11 years here, but never with health insurance. She pays her own medical expenses—even after she scalded her hand in a vat of broth at a soup plant and after stomach and back pain immobilized her at a tile-painting factory where workers...

Compared to other countries, the United States, through luck or skill, has been able to embrace its immigrant population with relatively few problems. “In general, Europe, which has never developed an immigration culture, seems to have been less successful than the United States at integrating foreigners and giving them a stake in a new national identity,” says Richard Bernstein. “At the same time, European immigrants seem to have been less eager than immigrants to the United States to take on a new identity, instead adhering to their traditional identities, languages and customs for generation after generation.”¹

Peter Ericson, who wonders...