I was just saying that one driver of behavior and possibly a lack of assimilation was the fact that large numbers of illegal immigrants, and possibly legal ones, was that many tell themselves year after year that they are here to earn money to make their lives better at home. I was not making a value judgement, just pointing out that people who do not expect to become permanent residents follow a different path of assimilation.
I did see a study on assimilation from the early twentieth century which found that those with the least community support, the most isolated, learned the language much faster than their peers living in neighborhoods with large numbers of same language immigrants. They also moved much further up the economic ladder much faster than their peers. Given the zero growth birth rates for the native born population, higher immigration rates are a national economic necessity. Where the US misses the mark is our .2% of GDP spending supporting those displaced by off-shoring, and the downward pressure on blue collar wages due to wage suppressing immigration.
