I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

Sent to me via email from a well meaning friend in Texas:

Last week there was an  immigration overpopulation conference in Washington, DC, filled to capacity by many of American's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant  college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his  latest book, Mexifornia," explaining how immigration - both legal and  illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it  would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The  American Dream.  Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and  gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America The audience sat  spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the    United States. He said, "If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy America. It is not that   hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.   Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that 'An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit   suicide.'"
 Here is how they do it," Lamm said: "First, to destroy America, turn America into a bilingual or
   multi-lingual and bicultural country." History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual
  to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: "The histories of bilingual and bi-cultural societies that do not   assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy." Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of national existence   in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan  and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion.  France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans."
         Lamm went on: Second, to destroy America, "Inven 'multiculturalism'  and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture. I would make it an  article of belief that all cultures are equal. That there are no cultural differences. I would make it an article of faith that the  Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice  and   discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.
  Third, "We could make the United States an 'Hispanic Quebec' without   much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As   Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: "The apparent   success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have  been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance   that once dictated ethnocentricity and what it meant to be an  American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together." Lamm said, "I would encourage all immigrants to keep their  own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor  with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their   differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities."
 "Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least  educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high. school."
  "My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in  ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology'. I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all  minority failure on the majority population."
  "My sixth plan for America's downfall would include dual citizenship,  and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people   worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they  are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is  against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it
  takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a  common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All  Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough   to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions   that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. "E. Pluribus Unum" --  From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on  the 'pluribus'. Instead of the 'Unum,' we will balkanize America as surely as Kosovo."
  "Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits; make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity.' I would find a word similar to 'heretic' in the 16th century - that stopped
  discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like 'racist' or 'xenophobe'  halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural  country, having established multi-culturism, having the large   foundations fund the doctrine of 'Victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America, it must always be  good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them."
 In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow.
   Profound silence followed. Finally he said,. "Lastly, I would censorVictor Hanson Davis's book Mexifornia. His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America If you feel America. deserves to  be destroyed, don't read that book.".
   There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous
cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that  room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today.   Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the  foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even  barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are  growing as we celebrate 'diversity.' American jobs are vanishing into  the   Third World as corporations create a Third World in. America - take  note of California and other states - to date, ten million illegal   aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell's book   "1984." In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of   Truth building: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance   is strength.".
     Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California  wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.

She included a closing paragraph on apathy.

So I took a minute to digest this, stripped out a lot of Lamm's anger at victimology, and composed a reply:

Thanks for sending me this.

I should tell you that as the child of immigrants, I definitely have a bias TOWARDS immigration and its benefits. That said, I don’t support forced bilingualism at all. A country has a language – you want to live there, learn the language. Don’t even try to insist on keeping yours, except in the home. You want to live here, fly our flag. I get it that you long for your home country. But you did leave....and you are here. Be here.

I say that, and then with American imperialism, I really do expect that when I visit foreign countries as a tourist, they will speak English. There's some irony in that....

I do support diversity, though, because I have come to recognize, painfully, that a majority view doesn’t necessarily constitute a correct view. We have had many cases of that in this country. I have also come to recognize that a country does have an obligation to get in touch with its own biases and to recognize that underclasses do exist and arise, and may even have purpose. But I strongly feel that avenues should be there for people to get out of that underclass. My dad was Irish underclass in very empirical England in the Depression. They lived in the gutter, literally, and he suffered malnutrition problems as a child because there simply wasn’t enough to eat for the large Catholic family they had. But there were avenues, scholarships, etc. to help people climb out of poverty, and he took them, as did all his brothers and sisters. This kind of routing to the better life I totally support. But I must admit I am not that sympathetic to the Mexican immigration movement in this country, with its insistence on non-legal immigration and insistence on pushing Spanish on the rest of us. It sometimes feels almost like a reclaiming of the border by Mexico. And Texas is not much better – just across from Laredo is Juarez, and tons of American, German, and Dutch companies have their manufacturing plants there to take advantage of cheap labor. Girls are being murdered there daily, and no one stops it, despite a lot of documentary filmmaking on the subject. Were I a Juarez girl, I would try to make it across the border as fast as I could so I could live. If I were the mother of one, ditto.

The US has a long history of taking in underclasses, and the discussions of Mexican Americans today could be the discussion of Irish Americans one century ago, to be exact, or Italian Americans. Those were the underclasses in the early 1900’s. Two centuries ago, the underclass was American Indians, natives to this land. We have yet another new underclass in the Mexicans, but in a hundred years, will there be still a new one? Probably....I think some of what is happening here is that the assimilation of Irish and Italian immigrants, while painful, did eventually occur because they were white. Much of Lamm is pushing back on is the insistence of brown and black peoples that something is wrong with our system because it favors whites. We do know this to be true, and have proven it. Yet it remains to be seen what the proper course of action is. Most people are unwilling to give another race a leg up at the expense of their own. And is it right that we insist, as an English-speaking business world, that all races conform to that identity in order to succeed in business?

Funny to me is how in war much of this disappears. My ex-husband grew up in very prejudiced Macon, GA in the 1950's, and yet when he served in Vietnam, was completely able to lay aside all his prejudices and serve alongside black soldiers because of the enforced camaraderie of war.

So apparently under extreme duress, differences matter very little. That's something to note because I think it might demonstrate how very unimportant parts of this debate really are. In fact, I think the hype masks something else: fear. I think Americans are fearful of losing their nationalized and for the most part white identity. There weren't any hispanics at Plymouth rock. There weren't any blacks at the Boston Tea Party...unless they were offloading ships as slaves. I think Americans are afraid of what the new American might become under a browning.

But it is clear that we do have an incredibly large, sizeable underclass, insistent on keeping its language, and actually quite successful at doing so. We either push back hard and demand compliance, or keep allowing what has occurred to keep occurring. My sense of things is that if you have a national identity, you should expect immigrants to comply with it because they did choose to come here. And they may have very good ideas on what should be changed particularly if one segment of people is going to be locked out due to unrealistic bias on the part of the majority.

I also agree with the closing paragraph that complacency is the killer. EVERYONE thinks, well, why should I get involved? I’m ok....and that's what opens the vacuum for others with real agendas to come in and seize power and carve out the picture the way they'd like it to be. You should always work to exercise your voice and your vote. Those are your tools to help shape things and to keep power vacuums from opening up.