Cameron Park is a slice of America that few Americans would recognize. This settlement of 2,000 families is just inside Texas, but it gives every impression of being in Mexico: dirt roads, stray dogs, broken-down cars and a lot of children.

One of its residents is “Nora,” an undocumented 42-year-old Mexican who has been in the country for 12 years. She lives in a caravan trailer with her husband and four children, two of whom are American citizens.

The family finances are tight. Her husband brings in $200 a month, working as a bricklayer across the Mexican border in Matamoros. She gets $200 in food stamps and $90 from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Rent, water and electricity come to about $100 a month.

Occasionally Nora is helped out by the Cameron Park Cultural Center, a local help group founded by a resident, Gloria Moreno.

Money aside, Nora worries about the border patrol and about what would happen if she became ill. But she is determined to stay in America.

Asked why, she points to a photograph that dominates the kitchen wall: a picture of her daughter clutching a high school certificate. Many of the women in Cameron Park stumbled, pregnant, across the border for the same reason: to give their children a better start.

A few miles on the other side of the border, Maria, who is about the same age as Nora, tells exactly the opposite story.

She, too, lives in poverty; her husband, too, is a bricklayer. She has lived almost her entire life in Matamoros, the twin town of Brownsville, and she has never visited the United States. She is, she insists, a Mexican.

Among all the statistics about immigration, a simple fact is sometimes neglected: it is a momentous personal decision. Those who want to come to America, like Nora, will endure a great deal. But there are plenty of people who do not want to come.

In the longer term the only real solution to America’s “Mexican problem,” as an official Californian report in the 1930s ungenerously called it, is greater economic progress or a lower birthrate to the south. Neither is impossible.

Freer trade should certainly help to narrow the present 3-1 wage gap between the United States and Mexico. And other Catholic countries, such as Italy, have shown that a sudden reduction in the birthrate is possible.

But that is in the future. Even if immigration were to be reduced to a trickle within 10 years, states such as California, Texas and Florida would still face demographic change of a sort that few countries (and few other American states) can imagine.

At the moment American politicians prefer not to talk about that change. Caught between nativism and multiculturalism, they know they cannot win.

There is a strong feeling that it is better simply to leave the melting pot on the stove, and to come back when it has cooked.

The transformation that America is now going through will need a generation to take full effect.

“Yes, one-third of my country will claim Asian or Hispanic roots by 2050,” says James Smith at Rand, a California think tank. “But most of that one-third will also be something else. And our kids will live in that world. We will not.”

After all, everything worked out all right last time. And when the government has taken active steps to help the new Americans in the past – as with bilingual education – it has often done more harm than good.

Yet leaving the pot on the stove smacks of complacency. Whatever your reading of history, the Ellis Island immigrants were not just left to stew: laws were changed, wars fought, the English language imposed.

Moreover, this time around the demographic changes may be not just quicker, but more important.

If you believe even a fragment of the hype about the New Economy, then education, above all, clearly cannot just be left alone.

The contradictions and injustices in America’s immigration laws may become even more glaring. And if you want to keep yourself awake at night, you can think about White-minority politics and La Republica del Norte.

One event may come to be seen as pivotal to all this: the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Pessimists need only play the tape of Rodney King, the Black motorist whose beating began the whole horror, muttering to himself: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

But optimists, too, have come away with a lot from that episode. Los Angeles has rebuilt itself, and it is immigrants who have done most of the rebuilding.

And that is the right note on which to end: change, surely, is not a problem, but an opportunity.

Thanks to immigration, America has once again assembled a team of people who, simply by having made the journey to their new country, have shown their willingness to compete and their belief in the American Dream.

Look around the United States – not only at the affluent Indian programmers in “Silicon Valley” and the newly self-confident Latino middle class in Los Angeles, but at the undernourished Uzbek children in Queens or the wretched Tejanos in Cameron Park – and you will find the drive is still there. The rest of the country must not waste it.

John Micklethwait writes for the Economist magazine.



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