Can America Still Assimilate Immigrants? Newcomers don’t threaten America: The danger lies in diminishing the values of freedom and opportunity

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpt:

"The cost-benefit analysis of immigration is as old as the country, and let’s continue to have it out. Do the long-term benefits outweigh the significant upfront costs borne by border states and locales? Economics aside, what are the cultural and political trade-offs? If increasing a country’s population harms living standards, Prince Harry and other population-control advocates might explain why it’s so hard to name a country that was richer when it had half as many people. If low-skill immigrants are stealing jobs and depressing wages, labor protectionists should tell us why the unemployment rate in the U.S. is currently so low and why the largest wage gains have been among less-skilled workers. If illegal aliens drive up U.S. crime rates, how is it that the sharp reduction in violent crime in the 1990s and 2000s coincided with a tripling of the undocumented population?

The parameters of this debate seem to be in flux right now. Liberals who have long favored more generous migration policies on humanitarian grounds now want the border effectively erased and immigration-enforcement agencies disbanded. Progressive politicians openly and routinely help illegal immigrants evade law enforcement. Meanwhile, people on the right who used to channel Ronald Reagan are now channeling France.

Chris DeMuth, a former head of the American Enterprise Institute, sees European-style nationalist impulses as something conservatives should harness rather than discourage. Amy Wax, a law professor and veteran of the first Bush administration, wants the U.S. to accept fewer nonwhites from underdeveloped nations because, among other things, multiculturalist elites “resist the assimilation of immigrants to a uniform American way.” She’s right, they do. So, isn’t her real beef with the multiculturalists and not the immigrants? As David French of National Review noted, Indian-Americans, who hail from a country that is neither Caucasian nor part of the First World, haven’t had a problem assimilating economically. According to census data, they have the highest median household income of any group in the U.S., including whites.

What’s worth preserving is not “American culture” but American values, which emphasize freedom and opportunity rather than some tribal notion of collective solidarity. Our values aren’t threatened by immigration, but they could be threatened by those who would have America follow Europe’s lead."