JPod and Derb: Since I live in neither in Babylon on the Hudson nor in the Berkeley of Long Island maybe I can settle things. First of all, Emma Lazarus just doesn’t have much to tell us about immigration policy — it’s not 1910 any more and New York’s experience is no longer the norm for immigration — in fact, it’s something of an outlier. And her poem isn’t just a cliche, it’s a propaganda cliche; inserting “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor!” into an immigration-policy discussion is like answering an economics question with “Overfulfill the Plan by 110 percent!”, or settling a philosophical dilemma by chanting “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live!”

But it’s also not 1910 in terms of our moral worldview. The civil rights revolution really did change things, though the circle of the “we” (people considered fit for membership in the community) has been expanding pretty consistently here for centuries. It didn’t have to be this way — Japan and Finland and Israel and Botswana define their nationhood in ethnic/racial/religious terms, and more power to them. But it’s not for us. This isn’t pure “proposition nation” malarkey, but rather proposition-plus, a combination of universalist ideology with a particular ethno-cultural inheritance.

Maybe this is unsustainable, but it’s an accomplished fact. So the question for American patriots has to be how best to sustain national cohesion given this self-conception. I applaud the efforts of Ward Connerly, Roger Clegg, John Fonte, and others in combatting racial preferences, bilingual ballots, dual citizenship, and the other nation-breaking strategems of the post-Americans. But none of that can work without drastic, permanent cuts in immigration — from everywhere and anywhere.