Brimelow asserts that thanks to immigration, the United States is on the verge of turning into a cauldron of ethnic conflict on the order of Lebanon or Yugoslavia. But America isn't a multicultural society. It's a melting pot with a tiny minority of radical separatists. The children of immigrants continue to learn English and assimilate despite the excesses of bilingual education, just as they always have. None of this is to say that there aren't problems with the current system.
Illegal immigration is an obvious one.
The bias of the 1965 reform act, which skews immigrant pool by giving heavy weight to distant family ties, is another. The result has been to favor a few ethnic groups, the largest of which are unskilled and poorly educated Mexicans, and to crowd out many nationalities whose members can't enter because they don't have relatives here. Immigration is also unfair to states like California and Florida, which disproportionately attract newcomers. This is because the economic benefits of immigration flow to the federal government, while most of the costs accrue locally. In New York City, where the foreign-born population exceeds twenty percent, tax revenues generated by immigrants do not cover the cost of increased school enrollment, for instance.