Mark Fisher is an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, so he's not required to be objective or keep his personal feelings out of his work. But that's no excuse for playing the grandmother card. After discussing white flight, and local government attempts to deal with illegals and blight, he writes:

Stirrup says this time is different. "In previous waves of immigration, you had a vast majority of the immigrants who wanted to assimilate and embrace the American dream," he says. "These individuals have no desire to embrace American culture. Their motivation is a purely economic one — to make money and ship it home."

I thought back on my grandmother's stories of hoarding the dollars she earned in a hat factory in New York's Lower East Side and sending what she could back to her family in her native Russia. Yet sending money back in no way diminished her determination to be a hard-core, flag-waving U.S. citizen who embraced the United States, right down to watching Lawrence Welk on TV every Saturday night.

What is different about the recent spurt in immigration is that our country has changed: Jobs and cheaper housing are no longer in city neighborhoods where immigrants live in isolated ghettos. Instead, immigrants—legal or not —live smack dab in the middle of the rest of us. That confronts us with the culture clash that has always been part of the glorious process of becoming American.

Marc Fisher - The Melting Pot Boils Over

Actually, the difference is that the immigrants now are Mexicans. They have a perfectly good country of their own, to which they remain loyal. As I explained in a previous blog item, [Age Of Disloyalty] earlier generations of immigrants had no homes to go back to. For example, it's not likely that Fisher's grandmother would have felt any loyalty to the Czar of All The Russias, because she would have been a member of an oppressed minority. [See Appendix B to The Melting Pot. ] But modern immigrants are, as Steve Sailer wrote yesterday

don't care much about citizenship (or America either, for that matter.) They are, in the most part, patriotic Mexican nationals here merely for the money.

And as Samuel Huntington pointed out, the Ellis Island generation didn't come from a country right next door with irredentist claims on the Southwestern United States.