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There is more of an emphasis placed on people of color than there are Caucasian immigrants definitely. Xenophobia is playing a part in the immigration debate but it is taking form in interesting ways. Our ideas of immigration are conflicted between those that come to study in America and eventually learn to master English and stay here and those that come here illegally. For years people of all colors came to America to learn valuable skills that they may or may not take back into their own countries and were seen as individuals that were adding value to the research that was done in the United States. Often these individuals would stay in the United States and teach in the universities here, or end up working in one of the computer scientists programming or whatever, and for the most part would fade into the background.

It was not until the exportation of cheap labor and what appeared to be a dramatic rise in illegal immigration that the current focus on illegal immigrants from Mexico began to become a serious problem here. There were already issues with the exportation of knowledge work to Asia that had white collar information technology workers enraged back in the late nineties to begin with so one would wonder why we would have to suffer the additional insult of having both the low and high class jobs being taken away from us. The truth is somewhere in the middle; on the one hand it is even more difficult to find lower paying jobs to begin with (and not just those that the illegal immigrants are taking, those labor jobs most of us do not want) as low-rung clerical and administrative jobs may require actual technical skills these days, on the other there are more opportunities to do higher level technical work, but you have to compete with the rest of the world, instead of just other Americans, to do the same work.

The US media has been very instrumental in focusing on the self-segregation and isolation that is representative of some, not all, of the immigrants that come to America. For example much of the issues that people have with the immigrants, and the xenophobia that surrounds their coming here illegally, seems to be more pronounced in areas that did not typically have a lot of immigrants in general, mainly the South, while at the same time out West while there were always a lot of immigrants because of the close proximity to Mexico more of them are in areas where they normally would not have been previously. These days you have Mexicans,

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