Washington, DC – Fred Mars of North Potomac, Maryland immigrated to the United States from China when he was 12 years old. He didn’t speak any English. Today the electrical engineer lives with his wife and two children.

Mars is just one of a growing immigrant population in the area and the United States. It is widely known and appreciated that immigrants make up the fabric of American culture and consciousness.

But what about illegal immigration? In August, 2006, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placed the “unauthorized” immigrant population at 10.5 million as of January 2005 and indicates that if recent trends continued, the figure for January 2006 would be 11 million. The issue has rocked the country – particularly in states like Arkansas and Alabama. It has colored the Republican Presidential debates and it continues to be an emotional area of contention. But the issue also strikes close to home.

In July 2011, Fox News dubbed Montgomery County as the number 2 best place for illegal immigrants to live in the United States because of its excellent job market and social services. A “Secure Communities” act was introduced in April 2011 that would give police officers the right to check the criminal and immigration records of all local arrestees.

Should Asian Americans care? DC immigration lawyer Elena Hung says yes. She says that this kind of anti-illegal immigrant sentiment could translate to an anti-immigrant sentiment overall.

“Police officers are stopping people because they look foreign. It’s all about the perception. And when we can’t trust local police officers to protect us, it is damaging to communities,” Hung said.

One of the most recent proposals to stem illegal immigration is a mandatory e-verify bill, which would require all employers to check the legal status of candidates before they make a hire. At the moment, Hung says, the program has an error rate of up to 54%, particularly with foreign born workers. Furthermore, the program is expensive for small business owners – which is what a majority of immigrants are.

Erin Oshiro of the Asian American Justice League has similar concerns. “AAJC opposes a stand-alone e-verify bill,” Oshiro said. “Immigration has to be a comprehensive solution.” Oshiro also voiced her frustration at how the debate has often been focused on illegal immigrants crossing the border and avoids the larger problem of immigration reform.

“Politicians are not paying attention to Asian Americans. We’re often lost in the shuffle,” she said.

But Oshiro concedes that such widespread reform would be costly and difficult, particularly in the currently divided and distracted Congress. And yet, at the heart of much of the loudest concerns about immigration are those who say that immigrants take jobs away from American citizens.

“Immigration is a public policy meant to serve the American people, yet the American people are being ignored” said Ira Mehlman the media director of the Federation for American Immigration. Mehlman said that illegal immigrants are competing directly with legal residents for jobs, for spaces in schools, and interfere with legal residents’ ability to access resources.

“Asian Americans are Americans too,” Mehlman said. He says that legal immigrants who have followed the law have to compete with those who have broken the law.

Augustus Alzona, the Political Director of the National Asian American Republican Coalition, has other concerns. A Filipino immigrant who first encountered the United States as the child of a diplomat, Alzona has lived in the United States for forty four years – during which he saw Washington, DC change from a sleepy Southern town to the bustling metropolis it is today. Alzona says that in the last couple of years, he has seen more anti-immigrant sentiment in small-town America than in all his years here. He attributes this partly to the disingenuity of politicians when talking about immigration reform and partly to the immigrants themselves who are increasingly withdrawing into their own ethnic communities and contributing to a fractured American society.

“We need to have something between blanket amnesty and the current ‘just letting things go’,” Alzona said. “We can no longer afford to let things go. I’m concerned about us losing our national identity and starting to be Balkan-ized.”

It seems that across the board, both pro-immigration and anti-immigration advocates believe that there should be a reform of some kind – else the America that all residents came for changes into an American no one wants to live in.