Like I said, I have no problem with my cashier speaking other languages to other people to accommodate their proficiency. To me that seems like a no-brainer. With a group of co-workers who all speak English proficiently, that's a different story. It comes across as intentionally exclusionary, and it's bad for cohesion.

Ok, this kind of goes back to the Hillary thread, at least for me, as Ted Cruz came up fairly highly for me on the exercise.

I pretty much can't stand Ted Cruz and feel most of what he does is for sensationalism and positioning within his political party, but, even though I wouldn't vote for him, I begrudgenly agree with the idea behind his immigrant stand that A. we should secure the border and B. enforce and encourage legal immigration.

If you want to come here, you have to do it the right way : legally.

I think the best way to do that is to make it easier to do it legally.  By most accounts, it's a horror show right now.  Fix that, and most people, I think, won't bother trying to sneak in.

There's a difficult balancing act that we haven't figured out yet. If legal immigration is too difficult, we get illegal immigrants living in an underground economy; if it's too easy, we get half the population of every poor country in the world heading this way until we reach the point where life here is no better than it is there - and is turning the US into a third-world country really a solution?

In recent decades we've had the pendulum on the "difficult" end of the range, and the problems inherent in that approach have led to growing pressure to make immigration easier, fairer and more sensible. Inevitably, this trend will continue until the problems of integrating large numbers of immigrants leads to fears of a breakdown like the Western Roman Empire (the barbarians who overran the Empire were not trying to destroy it, they were trying to immigrate), and that will lead to calls for tightening immigration again. We've been thru this cycle over the last two centuries, and will probably go thru it for the next two, at least.

I think it's safe to say that this isn't MY country, or THEIR country, it's OUR country. While it is far from perfect, we enjoy freedoms here that many countries envy, and many people from all over the world come here to join all the other immigrants already here, which is to say ALL OF US (excepting the Native Americans, of course). We have the inalienable rights to worship or not as we please, believe as we please, and speak as we please in whatever language we please. I think we're getting too side-tracked on what language is being spoken and not on how to best balance the number of people who want to live here with maintaining or raising everyone's (new to the country or born here) standard of living (except the extremely rich, because they always do just fine).

A friend of mine wanted to move to Canada. Their immigration restrictions are very high. I believe you need a job waiting for you and a certain amount if money in savings, in addition to the standard citizenship requirements. Suffice to say, none of us could move there tomorrow.