‘A SERIOUS dispute between conservatives has opened up” over immigration policy, John O’Sullivan writes (“America’s Identity Crisis,” NR, November 21). Maybe, but I think not. What could open up is a serious, and potentially unpleasant, dispute over the arguments with which Mr. O’Sullivan overloads his appeal for cutting back on immigration. He asserts that Americans are undergoing an “identity crisis” that can only be resolved by their finally coming to recognize that they are a nation pretty much like other nations “in the European sense.” Mr. O’Sullivan rightly insists that there is a distinctively American character. But he wants to expunge from that national character the belief that America is a distinctively open society in a way that is related to our being a “nation of immigrants.” The serious dispute that John O’Sullivan perceives or wants to provoke is first about American identity, and secondarily about immigration.
On immigration, the spectrum of policy possibilities would seem to run from sealed borders and no immigration at all to unpatrolled borders and a welcome to as much of the world’s population as wants to come. Aside from some extreme environmentalists and negative-population-growth zealots, nobody favors keeping everybody out, and very few favor letting everybody in. The perfectly legitimate debate, then, is about how many immigrants should be admitted and the criteria for admission. It is a debate that Americans have had from time to time, and if it’s time to have it again, there needn’t be any alarm about a national “identity crisis” or destructive division among conservatives. Unless the debate is conducted on the basis proposed by Mr. O’Sullivan.
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