Let's pick apart a few words used:
"Melting pot" - Everything different that goes into the melting pot comes out the same.
"Mosaic" - Bits of fabric are sewn together, but the original fabric is still visible in the result.
"Melting Pot" = USA
"Mosaic" = Canada
Canada, for it's part embraces multiculture ,but the USA is more of a "adopt our standards, our nationalism, our guns, our capitalism, our democracy, or you get the boot" . It's hard to explain the difference, but I remember from Social Studies 10 (high school, BC, canada) a teacher wasting an entire class on explaining why canadian multiculturalism is a good thing, and melting pot is a bad thing. *shrug*
For what it's worth, I don't think "melting pot" applies in as such a literal sense for the USA. That same teacher also advocated that Communism was the best option for China because of it's population X_x
"illegal immigrant" or "illegal alien" - Of for cripes sake, this is just politically correctness being stupid again when they want to call them "undocumented workers", illegal alien correctly identifies the problem, despite dehumanizing them. "Undocumented worker" suggests that they can get documentation. They can't, they entered the country illegally.
There needs to be a crackdown on the businesses employing illegal aliens, like, as in "business crushing" fines. And yes, it's the same kind of businesses employing illegal aliens that were once slave owners. Know your history. They employ them, knowing full well they have no rights, and can't do anything to the employer to make them treat them right otherwise they expose themselves as an illegal alien and they get the boot. In fact that's the very threat the worst businesses use.
Erecting a fence does nothing but solve a symptom, not the problem. The symptom being "It's too easy for people to come across the border" (see China, Great Wall. See also Israeal-Palistinian wall, and Berlin wall.) IT doesn't solve the problem of "Why do people want to enter the country illegally" . Let's see
http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cf ... &year=2006, hmm, according to this map, there are several partly-free countries south of mexico (and another map showing mexico's press isn't completely free either)
The US is a giant target for foreigners from any country to get to. Unfortunately, the US "legal immigrant" system is split into two types:
a) Visa's, temporary legal H1B workers, and skilled/rich people
b) National Lottery, humane reasons - so many people are accepted from developing and undeveloped countries every year, it's pretty much "free green card". If you are a member of one of these countries, you have a 1 in 2 billion chance of getting one. I think getting struck by lightning is easier.
If you read the immigration site, (US, Canada, UK, AU, etc), they usually have an allowance for skilled workers(TN), rich people who want to start a business, family of the above, and H1B (temporary skilled workers), etc
None of those allow "unskilled people who are willing to take crap jobs that nobody else will work cheap enough to do".
I should probably point out that many jobs illegals do aren't so much jobs that no american will do, but rather no american wants to do at a wage the employer is willing to pay.
Really, would you want to clean poo off the walls of restrooms for 5$ an hour? Didn't think so. (I've seen 19$/hr jobs for resident managers (Janitorial/maintenance), so yes there is a price people are willing to work at.)
Anyway. Not everyone is right, but not everyone is wrong either. I see "illegal immigrants = bad thing", but that doesn't mean that "illegal immigrants = bad people", many may be desparate. In fact another example from canada... Canada sent the chinese boat people back to china... they probably were either all arrested when they got there and executed, or took their own lives. If canada didn't send them back, we'd be having this happen frequently. see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_people , with what happened with Vietnamese people. Some news articles linked from there suggest that most of the people trying to escape are not skilled, and wound up as "dishwashers'
EDIT:
Oh I should point out that the illegals that arrived in vancouver "probably disappeared accross the US border, being sold as slaves by snake heads" , here's a site with pictures
http://www.library.ubc.ca/asian/FinalAs ... anada.html
oh here, some stories from illegal immigrants from china
http://www.library.ubc.ca/asian/FinalAs ... views.html , horrific.