Now, many Latino immigrant-rights organizers and their sympathizers seem to be saying that there is some inherent right being expressed when people sneak into the country, thumb their noses at the law and make fools out of those who wait patiently in foreign lands for visas to come to the United States.

Get the rest of Joe Hicks’ piece here.
Then there’s the piece in the New Yorker suggesting that immigrants are just coming to work and the US was made strong on the backs of immigrants (including the inventors of Google and the I-Pod, intentionally blurring the distinction between legal and illegal. And then suggests all they want to do is pay taxes, live in the US peaceably, and assimilate:

In California, an increasing number of Mexicans get identity cards from their government, which allow them to apply for U.S. bank accounts, credit cards, and mortgages, and to obtain a tax-identification number from the I.R.S. Many neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles now have a property-owning, tax-paying middle class of illegal aliens.

New research by the Berkeley economist David Card confirms that recent immigrants are assimilating pretty well. Card looked at the experience of immigrant families in the past four decades, and found that, on average, the children of immigrants have higher education and income levels than the children of non-immigrants.