Mixology

The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, by Michael Barone (Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95)

JUST a hundred years ago, at the height of the last great wave of immigration, Irish, Italians, and Jews were each regarded as a race apart: so Michael Barone reminds us in this short, smart introduction to the tide of new immigrants who have arrived on our shores in recent decades. All were considered physically distinctive in ways that could never be ignored or erased, and each was thought to be burdened by a sharply inferior, “unassimilable” culture. “By the definitions [of] 1900,” Barone muses mischievously, “we are already a majority-minority nation.” Thanks to the Ellis Island influx, the northern European Protestants who initially settled the country have long been a distinct minority.

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Tamar Jacoby

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The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, by Michael Barone (Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95)

JUST a hundred years ago, at the height of the last great wave of immigration, Irish, Italians, and Jews were each regarded as a race apart: so Michael Barone reminds us in this short, smart introduction to the tide of new immigrants who have arrived on our shores in recent decades. All were considered physically distinctive in ways that could never be ignored or erased, and each was thought to be burdened by a sharply inferior, “unassimilable” culture. “By the definitions [of] 1900,” Barone muses mischievously, “we are already a majority-minority nation.” Thanks to the Ellis Island influx, the northern European Protestants who initially settled the country have long been a distinct minority.