Asian Indians, one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in New Jersey, speak as many as 20 different languages.
IMMIGRANTS BY COUNTRY
India 9%--------------------~~J
Dom. Republic 7% ~i  
Colombia 6%	 
Mexico 5%' Peru 5%~ Others 68%
SOVSCHS: IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE AND NEWSWEEK SOURCES JULIE SHAVER NEWSWEEK
that most immigration to the United States had always been from Europe, those who voted for the act of 1965 generally assumed that family-reunification visas would be used by Europeans. They also assumed that there would be no large increase in immigration to the United States.  Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,  Sen. Edward Kennedy told a subcommittee hearing.  Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration [about 300,000 a year] remains substantially the same. . .
That is not what happened. Immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, a trickle in 1965, has steadily widened so that it now comprises about 90 percent of the total. Legal immigration from 1971 to 1990 was 10.5 million people but if 3 million illegals are (conservatively) added in, the total is pretty much the same as 1900-1920, the peak years in American history. Owing partly to a further liberalization of the law in 1990 and partly to the IRCA amnesty, the United States now accepts more immigrants than all other industrialized nations combined. (Upwards of 80 percent are persons of color: so much for the myth that U.S. policy is racist.) Proponents of further immigration argue that the current influx is actually lower than the 1900-1920 peak when considered as a percentage of the U.S. population. They are right: it was 1 percent of the population then and about one third of 1 percent now. But it is still a lot of people.
And the law is full of holes. A majority of those who get familyreunification visas (235,484 in 1992) come in with no numerical restriction at all: for them, at least, immigration is a form of entitlement program. Others game the system by forging documents, faking job histories and hiring smart American lawyers to get them eligible for resident visas and green cards. This is known in federal jargon as  adjusting status,  and in most years it works for more than 200,000 immigrants. The asylum hustle is the newest wrinkle. By claiming political asylum, would-be immigrants circumvent the normal rules and, because the jails are full, are usually freed to stay and work. Many simply vanish into the underground economy.  We didn t [expect] the asylum problem,  says Lawrence Fuchs.  We thought of it as the ballerina
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PLURALISM
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL
in the tutu saying,  I defect, I defect.
Immigration policy is simultaneously a statement of America s relationship with the rest of the world and a design for the national future: it is, and probably should be, a mixture of altruism and selfinterest. Current U.S. policy contains elements of both but it is a blurry, heavily brokered policy that has been cobbled together over the decades to reflect the changing fads and competing interests of domestic politics. A purely selfish policy would accept only immigrants who could contribute to economic or social progress. But this idea awarding visas on the basis of talent or skill 
has always been opposed by organized labor and other groups, and it is a minor feature of today s law, totaling about 140,000 out of 810,000 visas annually. Conversely, providing a haven for refugees is in the best tradition of the American conscience, and the United States has taken a lot of refugees since 1970 1.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Cubans, Russians and other oppressed nationalities.
But the vast majority of those who get here are ordinary folks pursuing a better life and although this, too, is part of the American tradition, the question can and should be asked: What s in it for us?
What does all this immigral America and Americans? Ju] a University of Maryland says he knows the answer: r gration means more economi more wealth and more prog Americans, period. Pat Buc talk-show host and erstwhile candidate, has a different an immigrants mean more sot and the slow erosion of tl speaking, hybrid European call  American. 
There is a third issue as many people, really, can th United States support? Immi
Immigrant Schools: The Wrong Lessons
UNION AVENUE ELE-mentary school, a dusty sprawl of concrete, asphalt and chain-link fence just west of downtown Los Angeles, bears all the scars of the inner city. Yellow caution signs mark the perimeter: narcotics ENFORCEMENT AREA. RESIDENTS only. In the distance a police helicopter circles over a crime scene. After school, parents anxiously hook their fingers through the fence and wait for their kids to emerge. But because Union Avenue draws from a heavily immigrant neighborhood, its 2,000 students have even more to surmount than the grim realities of crime and poverty. They also face the enormous obstacles, educational and societal, that stand in the way of foreign-bom newcomers.
The student body is more than 93 percent Latino. The second largest group is Filipino, at 2.9 percent. A third of the students were bom outside the United States, and well over half are not proficient in English. As many as half may be children of illegal aliens. There are as few Anglos as there are Native Americans: six. In the school library there are books in Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish and English. But
not even a third of the faculty can speak Spanish. The others rely on bilingual teacher assistants to translate the lessons. This is an explosive subject here. Many claim that bilingual education has done more to divide teachers than to help Spanish speakers. Defenders see it as a multicultural keystone. The faculty has been Balkanized by bilingualism: at lunchtime the two sides segregate themselves by table.
Most of the newest immigrants come from Central America, and many bring with them the trauma of war. Asked whether he had witnessed much fighting in his hometown of San Rafael, El Salvador, which he left three years ago, fifth grader Angel Alfaro nods but doesn t want to talk about it. Asked about his school and what he would do to fix it, he perks up and says in unaccented English,  Nothing. It s perfect. 
The Union Avenue kids  eagerness to please, and to learn is irrepressible. Yet it is hard to be optimistic about their future. For all of its inadequacies, the school is a relatively calm way station. Most of the kids will go on to Virgil Middle School, where education competes with gangs, graffiti tag
gers and drugs. Fifth grader Reggie Perez, whose parents are Guatemalan, says he is going to go to a school in North Hollywood  because at Virgil there are just too many gangs.  Out of 15 students interviewed last week (the school is in session year round), all but one said their parents were trying to get them into a parochial school or bused to a school in a better neighborhood. Still, most of the fifth graders will end up at Virgil.
Schools like Union Avenue are making a valiant effort. But as a recent report from the Rand Corp, says,  School systems that are beset by debt, declining and unstable revenues, dilapidated buildings and inadequate instructional resources cannot improve simply by trying harder.  The federal government has all but ignored the needs of states with large immigrant populations like California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. The single federal program that targets immigrant students is funded at $30 million a year or $42 per child. In California, where budget tightening has hit specialized programs especially hard, state officials estimate that they are short 8,000 bilingual teachers.
NEWSWEEl
Do you agree or t (percent saying a;
62% Immigrant jobs of U.S. work 78% Manyimm hard often takii Americans don t 59% Manyinur up on welfare an for Americans
THF NEWSWEEK POLL. JU
Historically, a s tion has been the   to assimilation. Bi ing the greatest su immigration since the century, the sc failing the 2 milli< who have been pa flux. Their educat isolating them froi stream, rather tha them to join it, ar them to all of the of ghetto life. Me the Newsweek Pc anti-immigrant sei the rise. Such a c sphere  doesn t n any easier,  said McDonnell, coaul Rand report. The of getting the bes new home has to get the worst.
Stryker McGui
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produces about a third of U.S. population Growth, and projections for the future ^nge from a population of about 383 million in 2050 to 436 million by the year 2090. All of these projections are sftjky based on complex assumptions about birth and death rates as well as immigration policy. Some environmentalists (and many Californians) think the United States should immediately halt immigration to protect the ecosystem and die quality of life. Fuchs says his commission has consulted environmentalists and population experts.  They persuaded us that the population growth is terribly serious on a planetary scale, but not in the United States,  he says.  So migration to the United States perhaps has a beneficial effect on the global environmental problem.  Still, Congress took no notice of this question when it voted to increase immigration in 1990  and given the wide disparity of current views, picking the  right  number of future Americans is ultimately a combination of taste and guesswork.
1965-1993
The face of immigration has changed over the last few decades, adding nonEuropean cultures, languages and religions to the melting pot
The further question is one that troubles Pat Buchanan and many others: can America absorb so many people with different languages, different cultures, different backgrounds? The answer, broadly, is yes which does not mean there will be no ethnic friction and does not mean that assimilation is easy for anyone. Assimilation is a generational thing. The first generation the immigrants themselves are always strangers in the land. The second generation is
46.	America: Still A Melting Pot? halfway between or (kids will be kids) rejects the immigrant culture. The third generation is hyphenated-American, like everybody else, and begins the search for Roots. The tricky part, which worries Fuchs considerably, is that America s  civic culture  is unique in all the world. It is the belief, as embodied in the Constitution and our political tradition,  that it is individual rights, not group rights, that hold this country together.  So here is the question for all of us, native-born and immigrant alike. At what point do policies like affirmative action and minorityvoting rights stop being temporary remedies for past injustices and start being permanent features of the system? The whole concept of group rights, as Fuchs says, is tribalism the road to Bosnia, not East L.A. And that, surely, is not what Israel Zangwill had in mind when he described America as the crucible of a new civilization.
With Adam Wolfberg and Bob Cohn in Washington, Andrew Murr in Los Angeles and bureau reports
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A