It's an easy crutch to fall back on since it appears that the largest number of illegal immigrants seem to be of Latin American origin. It's hard to get economic points across to dyed in the wool statists that believe the an influx of a certain group will destroy the country. Even if the person is not racist and might be straddling the fence between big government and minarchism they always bring up the kids of the immigrants are overcrowding the schools and not picking up the financial burden. They are uninsured and pack the ER at local hospitals. Their dwellings break fire regulations putting firefighters at risk. I tried explaining how well they actually benefitted the store that I work at, thanks in part to them we can sell association football cleats year round. No one wants to listen to the fact that they're not leeching off the economy but enhancing prosperity for everyone in the area. They didn't jump through the mandated hoops might have trouble with the language but they're trying.

Well I generally make the argument that people really don't have an option of not having these 13 million immigrants, they will be here because of the market, in fact the only real option Americans have is to have either 13 million legal immigrants, or 13 million illegal immigrants. By trying to put caps on immigration all Americans have managed to do is promote illegal immigration, and that ends up making America Hispanic heavy. Wouldn't it be better if you America gets 13 million immigrants from all over the world?

I mean I don't mind America having Hispanic majority, but I am sure people who want to curb illegal immigration do, putting this choice in front of them, and showing that by making legal immigration so god damned difficult(which 99.99% anti-illegal immigration people have no idea about) and not being for pro-free immigration all they are asking for is the illegal immigrants. You know the gun rights quip republicans have, 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns', I wonder why don't they extend it to other spheres, like 'when selling drugs is outlawed, only the outlaws will sell drugs', or 'when you restrict legal immigration, only immigrants will be the illegals'(or something like that, I know I didn't do a good job with it).

Also, its a good idea to not obviously call them out about racism, it doesn't help at all. As long as a person does not think he is racist there is no way calling them racist really helps, esp the anti-illegal immigration crowd. What helps is, if you tip toe around it, I don't think I know any anti-illegal immigration crowd who believes that they are racist(maybe they are, but then they don't consider themselves to be racist), they all have rationalizations, you must deal with their rationalizations, rather than calling them racists, because racism is irrational, if they accept it, then you cannot convince them otherwise.
So if you claim 'you oppose immigration because you don't understand economics behind it', this is good, and rational.

If you say 'you oppose immigration because you hate brown people', that's not good, and irrational, you can't argue rationally.

I just get severly bugged at the thought of anyone anywhere being an "illegal" human being. If you really think about it you may find that a person who is illegal based on what sort of an imaginary line they were born, is someone who a possible (powerful enough) majority would absurdly deem them to be less deserving of freedoms and liberties than everyone else.

At that scary point in time, it then somehow becomes okay for some people to do whatever they want to them. All they supposedly need is an official sanction. Because by then they really don't count as human beings like the rest of us do, right?

I know that sounds like a very extreme example, yet my memory isn't so short that I'd ever forget what happened to people who didn't look "uh-merikan" enough right after the 9/11 attacks. Hell, one of the assailants didn't even care if the victim, a store clerk,  was a sikh who happened to be wearing a turban, the guy got shot because of the stupidity & racism of the attacker. They all looked moslem to the hater. On the other side of the earth people are murdered everyday because they don't count as human beings either. 

I really don't think those kind of hateful people have gotten that much smarter in the last nine years as they sure as hell aren't showing it.