Check out this excellent commentary on the topic of immigration, “The Immigration Bill Sellout” Part 1 and Part 2. Ivory Towerz is one of my favorite blogs on politics and culture.

Immigration, especially as the issue heats up this and next year, is one of the issues that perplex me the most. Being an immigrant who has played by the rules to gain American citizenship, I can understand the arguments of anti-immigrant people who decry illegal immigration. Yet I can’t help but relate as well to undocumented immigrants who are here in this country to find work because the economies of their home countries are so bad they are willing to risk everything to have a chance to work in the US. I just can’t understand the vitriol and extremely xenophobic attitudes that often accompany anti-immigrant diatribes, especially as they relate to Mexicans and other brown-skinned people.

I agree with Jeff Siegel (the author of the articles I link to above) that what we are witnessing is nothing new in American history. Anti-immigrant sentiments and xenophobia have been experienced by the Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, etc. before.

Here is an interesting take on the immigration debate from the perspective of economics from the Left Business Observer.

As someone whose main interest is political participation in a democracy and who generally sees collective action from the grassroots as a good thing, this is where I see the true practice of democracy as actually quite messy and chaotic rather than the orderly vision that we learn in civics class in school. Both sides of the debate — the organized, anti-immigrant nativists on one side and the supporters and advocates of immigrants on the other — are both expressions of grassroots sentiments from the general population. Moreover, the ranks of both sides are primarily derived not from elite populations but from middle and working class folks. What should be a civilized, orderly debate looks more and more like gang war as the issue heats up the closer the presidential elections get.