Immigration is a dynamic force internationally. Immigrants are a worldwide resource. They are changing the demographics of nations as economically, politically and militarily as powerful as the United States. It has been predicted with some certainity that the ‘browning’ of America is a fact and that in the not very distant future, the whites will become a minority. This is a recognition of all population flows and growth in the world. Indian-Americans number more than 1.5 million in the country of their adoption and they have the highest average household income of any Asian ethnic group. They are leaders in business, but especially in high tech industries, particularly information technology. The Hispanics or Latinos, those who speak Spanish fluently and are of Central and South American stock, now number 12 per cent of the population and their proportion in the US population is expected to go up to 25 per cent by 2050!

Every year, according to William Frankel, about a million people emigrate to the United States. Seventy per cent of them come legally. Thirty per cent ‘will either have crossed a border surreptitiously or overstayed a visa limitation. In the case of the latter, the immigration authority is notoriously ineffective in rounding them up.’8

What Frankel does not say, but which is widely accepted, is that many of these illegal aliens are forced to work as daily wage labourers on farms, or in sweat shops as low-paid labour by unscrupulous employers who threaten to turn them in to the authorities should they squeal about their conditions. In numerous cases, the employers are their own kin or ‘countryfolk’, who have done reasonably well in life but are not above bending or twisting the law in order to do better.

Frankel makes another important point here—that the diasporas are forcing Americans to speak of ‘multiculturalism’, and no longer of assimilation. But a time will come, he warns, when ethnic assertions of separate identities will not be as easily tolerated as they are now and critics of immigration ‘now unheeded, are likely in time to find more support.’

There are two timely warnings here: one, that while the force of numbers, of demography, will change politics and social conditions, they will also lead to clear assertions of separateness. Two, that even in developed countries, the walls against immigrants have gone up. Indeed, they have been up for many years and the far right in Europe and the United States, not leaving aside Africa, Asia and Australia, are poised to make major gains everywhere. Globalization does not necessarily mean that countries and peoples shed their ethnic and cultural biases along with tariffs.