Immigration and Its Effect on the Economy of the U.S The 1990s have brought the largest influx of immigrants into labor force of the United States of any decade in this nation's history. A panel of social science scholars concluded their assessment of U.S. society with the observation that "America's biggest import is people" and determined that "at a time when attention is directed to the general decline in American exceptionalism, American immigration continues to flow at a rate unknown elsewhere in the world" [Oxford Analytica 1986, 20]. Unlike earlier mass immigration periods to