I'm not from the US, but also in Europe we have many illegal immigrants, so I can speak of the issue a bit.
I myself am from a family of legal immigrants and while I think I am quite "integrated" in my society, I have experienced the dark sides of intrahuman violence and prejudice as well.
The problem in the EU is that human rights are overstressed in a way that illegal immigrants come and ruin their host countries without being punished harshly enough.
If you read the newspaper, most crimes are done by illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants even train their children to steal rich people on the road because they know the children won't be punished - no: they will be taken to youth communities where they will get a much better life.
So, while the crime rates increase, the effective co-operation between people of different cultures degenerates: The Native Europeans start hating the New Europeans, too, since it's difficult for them to distinguish the legal from the illegal immigrants at first sight.
While I'm not directly aware of it personally, I think that many of my friends who are legal immigrants and are conducting a proper life (are educated at university and are serving the country they have immigrated to) are also the targets of the subtle discrimination that results from the problems caused by illegal immigrants.
For example, I have several friends from Romania. Some of them are in high professional positions and some are even studying with me at my university. But why do they get discriminated sometimes? Because their fellow people who entered the country illegaly are creating a totally distorted image of them.
I think that every human being should enjoy basic rights, but tighter control should be exercised to prevent criminals from profiting of the loopholes created by fragile law enforcement.
That way, you separate the "good" immigrants from the "bad" ones.
And then there will [hopefully] be more co-operation and less xenophobia/discrimination.
The second point I would like to address is that without a more efficient bureaucracy, illegal immigrants will tend to stack up in ghettos. Ghettos are the worst enemy of intercultural learning, and the best place to breed hatred between people.
With regards to culture and diversity...
My view is that e.g. if I enter a country as a Muslim and I freely interact with friends who are atheists, none of us looses our personal individual integrity: I could teach them about how to prepare some tasty Arabic food, and they can teach me how come religion brainwashes people.
The outcome of our reciprocal learning and teaching would be that all of us become happy atheists who know how to prepare Arabic food.
This is obviously an over-simplified example, but what I mean is that if we really want to uphold our personal, individual integrity, we cannot deny the fact that in each culture there are pro's and con's - and that we can all enjoy life by collecting the pro's from all cultures and rejecting the con's.
It's like when two professionals meet and exchange their experiences with different professional standards. An honest exchange of information would lead to the convergence of standards.
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