Jonah, one problem with your correspondent’s view is that immigrants have always been lawbreakers. There was a time around the turn of the 20th century when New York City was awash in, yes, Jewish gangsters and street thugs. In his book Low Life, Luc Sante details the ways in which my city’s slums were breeding grounds for criminal activity that mirrored some of the horrors of the 70s and 80s — except for the fact that guns were far more expensive and so the fighting went on with shivs rather than bullets. The difference is not that immigrants broke the law less, but that nobody at the time was making apologies or coming up with excuses for immoral and criminal behavior, which is, of course, the story of our time.