In response to Roger Clegg, this thread started when I responded to a recent article by Linda Chavez in which she advanced continued high levels of immigration. She recommended in that same article that affirmative action be denied to immigrants. I pointed out that denying affirmative action to immigrants would hardly solve the problem, since for groups who receive affirmative action, such as Hispanics, their descendents are entitled to it as well, and intermarriage does not lessen the entitlement. I know that Chavez has written and spoken against affirmative action in general, and I find it an irony that the continued high-level immigration she advances would result in an increase in the preferences that she deplores.Chavez responded in part by saying that preferences for Hispanics are about half that for blacks. This is why I emphasized that even if the Hispanic percentage is lower, it is still “a violation of principle,” since in this instance Chavez seemed to be offering the lower percentage as a mitigating factor. To answer the question, I am for lowering the number of immigrants at present, across the board and regardless of group, except in cases involving national security. But, again, I do find it an irony that conservatives who aggressively and sometimes belligerently promote high levels of immigration refuse to see how that policy feeds the affirmative action and multiculturalsm to which they object. True, these conservatives claim to be fighting these problems separately from immigration, but several decades of their efforts have failed to check them in the least. In fact, preferences now have constitutional endorsement, something few expected would ever happen here. Some of us have come to believe that only by lessening the numbers of immigrants for a while can we achieve the greater assimilation we desire and relieve the pressure toward multiculturalism and group equality, which is a gross violation of the basic proposition upon which the whole of American identity is said to rest, according to many of these same conservatives. At their Center for Equal Opportunity website, Roger Clegg and Linda Chavez declare that they are seeking “a pro-assimilation middle-ground between nativists who say that today’s immigrants cannot assimilate and multiculturalists who say that they should not.” I really wonder at the usefulness of words like “nativist” in the context of today. Be that as it may, there are those of us who feel we are in that middle ground. We certainly do not believe that today’s immigrants cannot assimilate, as if by a general rule, but that they are less likely to do so in today’s circumstances, given the numbers and given the multicultural ascendancy in which the very word “assimilation” is resented and repudiated.