Joseph Bottum follows up on the discussion that some of my colleagues had here a few days ago. His stress is on the dissimilarity of today’s illegal immigration to yesterday’s legal immigration. One point of possible similarity deserves mention. Yes, it is true that 100 years ago some Americans worried about the assimilability of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, just as they do about the assimilability of Mexican immigrants today. If those older fears now look foolish, however, it is in part because the country took a 40-year time-out from mass immigration. Whatever the motives of that time-out, it enabled a lot of assimilation.

I don’t think that a time-out is necessary today. But I do think that the country’s ability to assimilate immigrants, and thus allow immigration to America to continue to be the largely happy story it has been, would increase if we took in fewer immigrants (legal + illegal) every year. If we were able to enact policies that brought the number of new illegal immigrants down by 600,000, and then increased legal immigration by 200,000, I suspect the net reduction in total immigration would make assimilation easier.