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I am a fairly recent emigrant to the United States, married to an American and about to give birth to an American. I have navigated various frustrations and obstructions in my journey towards becoming a Green Card holder, and will no doubt encounter many more. There are times when I curse the system and the post-9/11 tightening of immigration regulations (exposed by Stephen Davis in the NS, "Deported from America", 22 November)--but I am reluctant to write off my adopted country just yet. And there are roughly 450,000 new Americans a year who feel the same way.

America has a higher percentage of resident foreigners (9.5 per cent of the population) than Germany (7.3 per cent), France (6.3 per cent) or Great Britain (3.9 per cent). By 2050, ethnic minorities in America will outnumber non-Hispanic whites; in Bush's home state of Texas, the Hispanic population of the city of Houston has increased to more than half a million in less than a decade.

More significantly, the immigrant sector as a whole contributes more to the US economy than it receives, and not just because immigrants are prepared to take jobs that natives don't want. As long as America encourages entrepreneurs, it will encourage legitimate immigrants, who are statistically more likely to start their own businesses, run their own businesses and profit from their own businesses than are natives. This "great epic of self-help", which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about in the 1890s, is at the heart of America's philanthropic tradition. When the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (an immigrant from Dunfermline, Scotland) finally retired in 1901, he created seven charitable and educational foundations, and virtually invented the notion of free public libraries, giving away more than $350m in his lifetime.

Americans, whether immigrant or not, are good givers. Every year they give roughly $240bn to non-profit organisations, and it is individuals who give the largest percentage. Haim Saban, whose impoverished childhood in Egypt and Israel was a far cry from his present status as one of Hollywood's biggest players, gave $40m last year to paediatric research at the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. The W M Keck Foundation, led for 30 years by Howard B Keck, an American born in Trinidad, is worth $1.2bn and is one of America's largest charitable trusts.

From my window, I can see two-dozen pre-schoolers enjoying Underwood Park, a playground and public space that was a gift to Brooklyn from the self-made industrialist John Thomas Underwood. Underwood emigrated to America from London as a teenager in 1873 and went on to transform the typewriter industry.

It's going to be a good Christmas for Juan Rodriguez, formerly of Bogota, now a resident of Queens, New York. Last November, he won a record $149m in the New YorkState Lottery. He has expressed a desire to give away some of his fortune to Colombian causes, but has no plans to return to Bogota. Why would he, his sister asks. "He loves it here."

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Organisations such as Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy report that Asian immigrants contribute to educational good causes above everything else. They do so through charitable foundations such as the Crystal Windows Scholarship, which awards $5,000 grants to Asian high school students unable to afford college fees. The scheme was founded by Thomas Chen, a Taiwanese immigrant who taught himself English while working 12-hour shifts in a New York sweatshop.

Charles B Wang, the software pioneer who arrived in New York from Shanghai at the age of eight, founded the Smile Train organisation to provide money for cleft-palate research. Again, however, he reserves his greatest donations for educational causes, and minority education in particular. Wang is a graduate of Brooklyn Tech high school, which enjoys academic pre-eminence and whose long waiting list for places makes no apologies for encouraging science geeks. A large proportion of its student population is Asian American.

Lower Manhattan's Nativity Mission Centre, an after-school programme for children most of whom are from Hispanic immigrant families, cannot claim a single billionaire among its alumni. But it does have a significant graduate success rate. Nationally, less than 60 per cent of Hispanic Americans graduate from high school. The Mission, funded almost entirely by private donations and staffed by a volunteer faculty, has a graduate rate of 90 per cent. It is benefiting from www.greatergood.com, one of the growing number of non-profit shopping websites. This easy, "one click" method of giving--you shop online and make a donation to your favourite charities by doing so--is attracting a new generation of micro-philanthropists.