I have two of four grandparents who came over on the boat. That should moderate my response to the waves of immigration which are forming the economy that I and my children must wrest a living from. It doesn't.

We have 8 million undocumented workers now and the president's proposal will remove whatever legal barriers there are to a huge increase in those numbers. Other barriers to immigration which kept wholesale exchanges of populations between every corner of this globe and our nation have also disappeared.

When the last large wave of immigration occured, during the turn of the century, contemporaries of my Grandma Amelia (from Germany) and Grandpa Joe (from Ireland) made the decision to emmigrate as a permanent committment. There are commuter illegals now, who divide their time, loyalty and homeland between two countries, and one characteristic of the illegals whom I know personally is an almost complete lack of civic involvement in US public life. It is very difficult to get undocumented residents of the community in which I live to report criminal activity, move to correct inequitable actions by community leaders and make an investment in the neighborhood when their residence in Mexico, their church and community are all hundreds of miles away and their primary interest is in that identity rather that the civic life of this place where they spend the large majority of their time.