think anti-immigration efforts aren't motivated by racism?

[acroyear]

Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend - New York Times:

Representative J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, who calls for deporting illegal immigrants and changing the Constitution so that children born to them in the United States can't claim citizenship, denounces "defeatist wimps unwilling to stand up for our culture" against alien "invasion." Those who oppose making English the official language, he adds, "reject the very notion that there is a uniquely American identity, or that, if there is one, that it is superior to any other."

Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, depicts illegal immigration as "a scourge" abetted by "a cult of multiculturalism" that has "a death grip" on this nation. "We are committing cultural suicide," Mr. Tancredo claims. "The barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emaciated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap."

ON talk radio and the Internet, foes of immigration echo the black legend more explicitly, typecasting Hispanics as indolent, a burden on the American taxpayer, greedy for benefits and jobs, prone to criminality and alien to our values — much like those degenerate Spaniards of the old Southwest and those gold-mad conquistadors who sought easy riches rather than honest toil. At the fringes, the vilification is baldly racist. In fact, cruelty to Indians seems to be the only transgression absent from the familiar package of Latin sins.

This section follows an excellent summary of Spanish presense in North America, far more extensive than any the Brits ever achieved, and then a history of the campaign to paint Spaniards, and later Mexicans, as people unworthy of holding the lands conquered by the United States from 1841 to 1848.

But really, "Western civilization will collapse in a heap" merely because Pedro gets a job and some legal medicine and his family doesn't starve?

Give me a break...

Western civilization thrives when those who aren't a part of it embrace it for the benefits it gives.