to the idea of assimilating into U.S. society. "I think I'm still a Mexican," she says. "When my skin turns white and my hair turns blonde, then I'll be an American." These newcomers in the day-laborer pen, from Mexico and El Salvador and Guatemala, represent a tide of humanity that is having a profound effect on the economy of the United States. Immigrants today do some of the dirtiest, most difficult and dangerous work in America, the work that native-born Americans – of any ethnicity or race – often will no longer do, or no longer do for the wages offered. As the country experiences one of the most massive immigrations in modern history, much of the public debate has focused on whether the arrival of 1 million newcomers a year, legal and illegal, is a good or a bad thing – whether the cost of educating immigrant children or feeding their poor is worth the benefit that comes from allowing them in. Whether, in the most simplistic terms, immigrants are a net gain or net drain, not only to the economy but to American culture and lifestyle. But just looking at the bottom line is not enough. A day in the life of Houston, or New York, or the District of Columbia would not be the same without immigrants, who toil not only on the bottom rungs of the economy, but also on the top. Like thousands of others, Smith moved to this planned community 40 miles north of Miami just a few years ago, searching for a safe and secure neighborhood like this one, where both modest homes and rambling mansions sit against the manicured landscape of palm and hibiscus, and gated streets called Wagon Way and Windmill Ranch gently curve around the shallow lagoons and golf links. Weston is a boomtown filling with refugees. But the migrants pouring into this part of Broward County are rarely those from the Caribbean, Central and South America – the immigrants to the south who have transformed Miami and surrounding Dade County into a metropolis ...
