I am the child of immigrants, but I think it's a complex situation. Obviously it is good (mostly) for the people coming into a country, with better living standards, escape from violence and opportunities for their children, but largescale immigration (especially illegal immigration where workers are in an even more precarious situation) coupled (as it often is) with an unregulated and de-unionised labour market has been shown to drive labour prices down at the bottom end of the labour market, it can also leave social services and public institutions overwhelmed by demand etc. This obviously has a negative effect on lots of people who would otherwise be able to command more pay.

There's also a big cultural element obviously and it's interesting, I had to go and visit relatives the other day and the older ones were all complaining about the change of a (historically Caribbean area of the city I live in) where people from Somalia, Eritrea and other parts of the world were moving in, and how it was bringing the area down and there were all of these things happening now that never used to happen, there were various tensions. I think that unpleasant (on both sides) ingroup/outgroup relationships irrespective of race can often result from largescale immigration, these seem to be exacerbated when there is a big cultural (and especially religious) difference and they can often feed into the labour issues and more importantly erode the 'collective feeling' that is important to social democratic institutions, with portions of the population defining themselves against the mainstream and through their 'home country' (a common feature of expatriate communities in a lot of places).

That super low cost labour (at below reasonable subsistence levels for any particular country) is important to business interests is one of the main reasons I think why largescale immigration has been more or less tacitly supported by most political parties in western Europe and the US for the past few decades, most of the measures pushed by people who are against it (on the face of it) do nothing to stop the flow and are designed (imo) to increase the precariousness of the situation of immigrants resulting in a more 'docile' workforce and a better bargaining position for businesses.

So I'm ambivalent and believe people should discuss the issue in an adult way.

Though I'm not anti immigration the stance of the US anti immigration groups really confuses me, the massive flow of immigrants (and seasonal labourers) to the US began more or less after NAFTA was made law and Mexican/Central American farmers were priced out of the market in large parts of it by subsidised US crops (particularly corn). Another factor is large amounts of people leaving the horrible situation (death squads etc) in smaller Central American states like Guatamala which is basically a direct result of the relationship between US companies and the landowning class there. All of this is reversible or solvable with the substantial resources that the anti immigration camp in the US have at their disposal, but instead they do things that will drive labour prices down even lower by making immigrants live a more precarious life. I don't understand