John M.: I agree that concern with bloodlines can lead to balkanization — but that’s actually the normal state of human affairs. Our country is the exception to the rule, an exception that required careful nurturing in difficult circumstances, nurturing that we’ve abandoned since the cultural revolution of the ’60s. Larry Fuchs in The American Kaleidescope quotes Japanese American kids in the 1920s in Hawaii talking in school about “our Pilgrim forefathers” — how many kids, even if they actually are descended from the Pilgrims, would be permitted to say such a thing in school today? I wasn’t making any kind of immigration point in my original post about Macedonia, but now I will: Until we return to cultivating at every level of society a strong trans-ethnic American nationalism, a policy of large-scale immigration is reckless and irresponsible.