Take a serious look at these remarks:

In parts of the country with lots of illegal immigrants—the 24 U.S. counties that border Mexico, plus much of the rest of California—the situation is becoming debilitating. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California estimates medical costs for illegal immigrants are running about $1 billion a year in her state; with superb political instincts, she's blaming no one and simply backing a bill to reimburse state and local hospitals with federal money. I spoke recently with an administrator of a Texas hospital in a border county, and he says current rules imperil his hospital and drive him nuts. And by the way, he's not allowed to call immigrants illegal. They're undocumented.

The full economic effects are much wider. Employers who hire illegals pay them cash and thus evade employment taxes. They may also not report revenue from the work the illegals do and thus evade income taxes. Companies that compete with these employers must cut their own costs, mostly by paying their own workers (regardless of status) lower cash wages under the table, and the tax evasion spreads further.

A downward spiral begins. Government revenues decline while demand for government services goes up. The burden on taxpayers grows heavier. They respond by finding their own ways to avoid taxes or simply by leaving, making the problem even worse.

Until recently this was mostly a theoretical worry, but the recent rapid increase in illegal immigrants is making it real—and not just in border states. Latest census data show illegal immigrants increasing fast in Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia.

I said this was big trouble for a couple of reasons. Economics was the first. The second is deeper. The situation we've created mocks American laws and ideals. It tells working, taxpaying citizens and other legal residents with Social Security numbers that they're chumps. Go to the emergency room, and if you can't pay your bill, the hospital can track you down and garnish your wages. But the illegal immigrant can't be tracked and doesn't pay the bill. You pay it, through your taxes. You dope.

Actually, it was Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor at large of FORTUNE.

Is this situation getting serious? I mean, is it possible to reach a point where there are so many immigrants that they start to destroy the integrity of a country?

As a primary theme, this blog looks at modern America from an ancient viewpoint. While ancient Rome does not offer too many lessons on the pitfalls of excessive immigration per se, a couple of points are worth considering.

Being an empire, Rome obviously had no objection to the inclusion -- even integration -- of numerous nationalities and peoples into the midst of daily Roman life. However, one thing remained sacrosanct, and that was the principle of Roman citizenship as a preferred category. Aliens were free to travel into Rome (or anywhere else) whether as slaves, traders, residents, whatever. But they did not possess the same rights as Roman citizens. This was one of the things which made Rome strong, and helped define it.

Roman citizenship carried responsibility, more or less analogous to what is called noblesse oblige today. Many historians agree that a key cause of Rome's decline was the decline in this sense of civic responsibility -- particularly military service. After 212 AD that was farmed out more and more to German tribesmen and other distant peoples -- whose loyalty to Rome was questionable. Defenses weakened accordingly, which makes sense, because how could non-Romans be entrusted with the defense of Rome? This is all the more the case when barbarian soldiers were called upon to defend Rome from other barbarians. True, some were heroes; Stilicho immediately comes to mind. But it just wasn't quite the same thing as the noble days when Romans defended their own country, and the Roman army was headed by Roman officers.

I am not arguing that this phenomenon was the sole cause of something as complex as Rome's decline, but I think it likely that psychologically, it was conducive to the decay (ironically) of classical values among the Romans themselves:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noted historian Edward Gibbons masterfully describes this decline of virtue:

"That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince" (1: 9).

In fairness, Gibbon doesn’t imply that such changes are irreversible and goes on to describe a time when "For a while the angry and selfish passions of the soldiers had been suspended by the enthusiasm of public virtue" (281). In reality, most of these upturns in Roman virtue were short-lived and the overall trend was away from the classical values so eloquently depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid.

The decline of Rome has been considered to include in its origin Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana -- which diluted the once-privileged status of Roman citizenship by conferring it to everyone in the Empire with the exception of slaves.

I found a fascinating letter reprinted in the New Left Review, which cites (a bit ominously, in my view) Caracalla's edict with approval, with historic implications for the future of the united States:

In 212 AD the Emperor Caracalla, mindful of the barbarian hordes at his borders and the growing costs of military expenditure, took the revolutionary step of declaring every freeman of the Roman Empire—from the banks of the Tigris to the Atlantic Ocean—a citizen of Rome. In a trice, the faltering superpower was reinforced by millions of new taxpayers, talents and recruits. The edifice endured for another two hundred years.

Today, does not Western civilization—in the hands of a mere 15 per cent of the world’s population and, thanks to globalization, as visible to the other 85 per cent as the contents of a Hermès shop-window in the Place Saint-Denis—demand a similarly unified power? Shared goals unite Europe and the US. We all seek to deregulate our economies, democratize our hinterlands, promote human rights. But our wealth attracts resentment and around us there surges a rising tide of the hungry and the dispossessed. Huntington’s homilies on the clash of civilizations ignore the crucial fact that the world is also divided into states. The point, for any man of action, is to ensure that ideologies and institutions coincide. Would there be an Islam today, if an Umayyad and then an Abbasid imperium had not arisen within decades of Mohammed’s death? If Damascus and Baghdad had not been political, as well as religious, capitals? Would we have a Christianity had there not been a Christendom, Carolingian or Byzantine, to hold back Arab incursions? A Mount Athos, without the ramparts of Constantinople? Cistercians, without a Frankish chivalry, Jesuits, without a Charles V?

.....

Is it just, is it democratic, that the inhabitants of the fifty states alone should vote for the American president, whose thumbs-down determines the fate not just of a couple of gladiators but of millions of lives?

The task, admittedly, would be easier if our new Augustus, relaxing on Air Force One, would scribble his reflections in French or German, as Marcus Aurelius in Greek. But the resemblance between the pioneers of the Tiber and the apprentices of the Potomac is striking: on both sides, one finds the same pragmatic refusal of abstraction, historical optimism, inaptitude for melancholy; chicanery everywhere, from the Operations Room to the marriage bed. Both offer a welcome for strangers and a respect for all gods. In both, the conquered—Latinos, Japanese—are granted citizens’ rights.

The first step is to instruct our international-law specialists to draw up a conversion plan, transforming a region of common values into one of shared sovereignty.

Is it possible that uncontrolled immigration is a foot in the door for creeping globalization which will ultimately threaten our constitutional freedoms? I worry that things may be approaching that point. International legal precedents are openly solicited by Supreme Court justices despite the Constitution's very clear language defining it as the supreme law of the land.

Can the Constitution ever be destroyed by barbarian hordes?

Hey, don't look at me; I didn't vote for Caracalla!

(But I don't think you have to be Phyllis Schlafly or WorldNetDaily to be a little bit concerned....)

UPDATE: Emperor Misha makes me look like a limp-wristed, namby-pamby miquetoast:

By adding another 8 million cases to the already severely backlogged (to the tune of 4.5 million cases) agency formerly known as the INS, he'll ensure that people who have tried to get here legally and have followed every rule to the letter can sit around and wait for a couple of more years, all so that President Peabrain can throw in a bid for a voting bloc that wouldn't vote for him if his hair was on fire.