In January 1994, Vice President Al Gore gave a speech in which he translated the national motto "E pluribus unum" as "out of one, many." "You all share the American belief that there is strength in all our differences," Gore told a crowd of Milwaukeeans. Evidently the Vice President did not take Latin at St. Albans or Harvard, and his remarks suggest he takes the view of so many in the baby boom generation that America was always like what it was like when he was a kid, that we have moved from the white bread 1950s to the multigrain 1990s, that we are now for the first time a "multicultural" society.

But the United States has never been a monoethnic nation. The American colonies, as David Hackett Fischer teaches in Albion’s Seed, were settled by distinctive groups from different parts of the British Isles, with distinctive folkways—not to mention the German immigrants who formed 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s population in the Revolutionary years and who, Benjamin Franklin feared, would never be assimilated. The welcoming spirit of America was set out by George Washington in August 1790, when he went out of his way to address the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. "It is now that tolerance is no more spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." The spirit of welcoming immigrants while affirming American principles was set early on, and this country has attracted immigrants more than any other. The percentage of foreign-born residents stayed in the 13 to 15 percent range from 1850 to 1920: heavy immigration has been the rule in American life, not the exception. Ethnic diversity is as American as apple pie—or soul food or tacos or dim sum.

It is my thesis that the minority groups of 1999 resemble in many important ways the major immigrant groups of 1900. The African-Americans of 1999 resemble the Irish immigrants of 1900. The Hispanics or Latinos of 1999 resemble the Italian immigrants of 1900. And the Asians of 1999 resemble the Jewish immigrants of 1900. Not in every way, of course, and in each case the analogy breaks down at some point. But the similarities are close enough to be instructive. A hundred years ago many Americans feared that the immigrant masses would never assimilate, would never become interwoven into the fabric of American life. But they did assimilate. And they can again. Contrary to what Gore implied in 1994, we are not in a wholly new place in American history. We’ve been here before.

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Let us look at each of these groups in turn, starting with the Irish who began emigrating in a rush from the famine-ravaged Ireland in the 1840s and the blacks who began emigrating in a rush from the impoverished rural South in the 1940s. Both were second-caste citizens, excluded by law and custom from government, and restricted in the economic marketplace. Both thus had good reason to doubt the legitimacy of the larger society from which they came. If English history, as Frederic Maitland claimed, was a story of the progress from status to contract, both Irish Catholics and Southern blacks were stuck in a condition where almost everything was determined by their status and where they had little opportunity to make their way ahead by contract.

In the years when their great migrations began, both groups had living memories of times of greater promise. In the Census of 1801 England had 10 million people and Ireland 5 million. In the countryside of Ireland today you can see canals and shells of factories built in the late 18th century very much like those built in England in those same years. In the next 40 years the population of both nearly doubled, but England grew robustly through its industrial revolution, while Ireland had a subsistence economy based on the potato. England had a lively parliamentary politics increasingly open to a growing middle class, while Ireland, where Catholics were denied the right to own land and to vote, developed a politics of mass protest. In the 1830s Daniel O’Connell led monster rallies, "backed up," as historian R.F. Foster writes, "by the implicit threat of mass disobedience, of unilateral withdrawal of allegiance, even of a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the state." Then, in the 1840s, the potato famine hit. Many Irish starved; many others emigrated; the population of Ireland declined from 8 million in 1841 to 6.5 million ten years later, bottoming out eventually at 4 million.

Economically stagnant, but politically vibrant: this was the society which sent hundreds of thousands of Irish to America: 656,000 in the 1840s, 1 million in the 1850s, 2.4 million more between 1860 and 1914. In America the Irish were the first immigrants to throng to the cities, where they made their livings mostly through hard labor and took naturally to politics. Andrew Jackson’s Democrats led Irish immigrants from the docks straight to the polls; New York’s Whig Governor William Seward sought their support by calling for government aid to Catholic schools. For the Catholic Church was the dominant institution for most Irish immigrants. In Ireland the Church had been a sort of underground organization; in the 18th century its priests were educated in Douai in France and only after the French Revolution did the British allow Catholic seminaries in Ireland. In America the leaders of the Catholic Church, starting with Bishop John Hughes of New York, were dominant figures in Irish life. This had enormous consequences. "The Catholic Church does not measure its success by the standards of society," wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his brilliant and heartbreaking essay on the New York Irish. "In secular terms, it has cost [the Irish] dearly in men and money. A good part of the surplus that might have gone into family property has gone into building the Church." The greatest monument of the American Irish—the Capitol of Irish America—is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built defiantly on the grand boulevard of the Protestant mercantile aristocracy, Fifth Avenue.

Status, not contract. The Irish performed poorly in economics and excelled at politics. Joseph P. Kennedy stood out because he was one of the very few Irish Catholics to amass a fortune in America, the exception that proved the rule. Not until the 1950s did Irish-Americans’ income levels reach the national average. But 70 years earlier, in the 1880s, most urban political machines were manned and run by Irish-Americans. Yet the Irish "never thought of politics as an instrument of social change," as Moynihan noted. "In all those 60 or 70 years in which they could have done almost anything they wanted in politics, they did very little." An example is James Michael Curley, five times the Mayor of Boston in a political career that spanned 50 years. His goal was to provide public jobs for Irish constituents; he succeeded, and Boston’s bloated payroll and high taxes choked off economic growth for two generations.

Habits of mind are transmitted from one generation to another, often long after the conditions that gave rise to them have changed. The Irish came here with reason to doubt the legitimacy of the rules of the larger society, and in America "the wild Irish" had high rates of crime and alcoholism—even while their love of hierarchy and their affinity for the state also meant that many of them became cops. They also produced many entertainers and athletes, and traditions of song and humor that became national favorites. They continued for many years after the 1840s to be physically distinctive. In her 1904 children’s book Freckles, Gene Stratton Porter, confident that her readers would know just what she meant, describes a boy as having "an Irish face." Discrimination against these visually distinctive Irish—all those signs reading "no Irish need apply"—continued until well into this century.

Irish distinctiveness was greatest in politics. Up through 1960, the differences in voting behavior between Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics in the Northeast, especially in New England, were as stark as the differences between blacks and whites in Mississippi today. But ethnic voting and ethnic preferences in public jobs were never sanctioned by the articulate elite. Curley once went to jail for taking a civil service exam for a constituent. Irish voters preferred Irish candidates—"I always vote for all the good Irish names," a Boston lady told me in 1962—and Irish politicians favored Irish job-seekers, but usually shamefacedly, without admitting they were doing so, without asserting a claim of right.

Today the particularities of Irish-Americans are mostly a thing of the past. In the 1950s, the Irish had surpassed other Americans in incomes and education levels. Then, in 1960, Curley’s successor in the House of Representatives, John Kennedy, was elected president. In the early 1960s, Irish Catholics abandoned the Latin Mass and vocations of priests and nuns dropped abruptly. Intermarriage with non-Irish became common and, with the advent of the birth control pill, large Catholic families mostly disappeared. The Irish, still distinctive on St. Patrick’s Day, had become interwoven into the fabric of American life. It took 120 years.

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People of African descent have lived in America since the first slaves landed at Jamestown in 1619. But the great migration of blacks within America came in the quarter-century after 1940. In the 75 years before that, even though wage rates were twice as high in the North, only 1 million blacks moved north, even while 27 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean. So great was the cultural divide in the three generations after the Civil War that to travel from South to North was, in people’s minds, to travel to another country.

The South of black Americans was almost another country—one about which Northern Americans remained mostly ignorant. When sociologist John Dollard published Caste and Class in a Southern Town in 1937, the picture he painted was utterly unfamiliar to most readers. He described how blacks’ refusal to observe unwritten rules was often punished with physical violence, at a time when lynchings were still common. Southern blacks, like the Irish, had good reason to doubt the legitimacy of the claims of the larger society, the more so, as the memory remained of the decade of Radical Reconstruction from 1867 to 1877, when blacks were allowed to vote and hold public office. It was in this South that 74 percent of American blacks still lived in 1940, and from this South that something like 5 million would venture north over the next 25 years.

This exodus was sparked by government, by the minimum wage enacted in 1938 and especially by war industry factories recruiting black workers. A federal fair employment practices code (granted by President Franklin Roosevelt under threat of a massive march on Washington from A. Philip Randolph of the Sleeping Car Porters Union) and the organization of great industries by pro-civil rights CIO unions made the North seem suddenly more hospitable to blacks than before, and the continuing demand for factory labor after the war ended brought a continuing stream of black migrants. To the North they brought a faith that only strong action by the federal government could overcome the discrimination they suffered. The long experience of caste discrimination convinced blacks, as it had the Irish, that the solution lay in mass political action.

The effective leaders of the black communities, North and South, were very often the clergy. Trained in seminaries almost completely separated from the white society, depending for their livelihood on building congregations, black ministers were natural community leaders. "The Negro church," writes Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters, "served not only as a place of worship but also as a bulletin board to a people who owned no organs of communication, a credit union to those without banks, and even a kind of people’s court." The black ministry, like the Irish priesthood, channeled many talented men from commerce to the clergy; but unlike Irish priests, black ministers had families and built dynasties, like Martin Luther King’s. The black civil rights movement in the South was led almost entirely by ministers; they also played a major role in civil rights movements and in electoral politics in the North.

Status, not contract. Southern blacks had limited chance to own businesses, and in the North blacks showed little entrepreneurial drive, but instead gravitated toward hierarchies. Even today, relatively few businesses in black areas are owned by blacks, and black incomes remain well below average. But blacks moved upward in the hierarchies of political machines, labor unions, the civil service, and, once discrimination was eliminated, in police forces.

"The usual human response to frustration is aggression," Dollard wrote, and once removed from the brutal sanctions of the segregated rural South, blacks, like the Irish, had unusually high rates of crime and of alcoholism and drug use—behaviors which can be expected from people who had good reason for years to doubt the legitimacy of the rules of the larger society. They produced urban riots, of a kind the nation had not seen since the Irish rioted against the draft in New York in 1863. Blacks also produced great athletes, starting with Joe Louis and Jesse Owens and Satchel Paige in the 1930s, and great musicians and entertainers, starting with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Even when America was almost a totally segregated society, jazz and the blues were recognized as the greatest examples of American musical art.

Every new ethnic group that suddenly emerges in the electorate will spark a competition between the political parties. Most blacks abandoned the party of Lincoln for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. In the 1940s blacks were still not much more than 3 percent of the electorate, since most southern blacks were barred from the polls. In the 1948 election, three candidates vied to be the strongest supporter of civil rights—Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, and Henry Wallace—but their chief demographic targets were the more numerous Jewish voters. In the 1950s the parties competed for black votes; Adam Clayton Powell supported Eisenhower in 1956, and blacks voted a far-less-than-unanimous 65 percent for John Kennedy in 1960. Then, in 1964, blacks became as heavily Democratic as the Irish had in the 1850s. This was largely because of John Kennedy’s support for the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater’s vote against it, although a larger proportion of congressional Republicans than Democrats voted for it.

At that time there were few black elected officials—only six blacks were members of the Great Society Congress in 1965. Within ten years, there were many more—mayors of Cleveland, Gary, Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, congressmen from a dozen more districts, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. Most of these new black officials, unlike their Irish counterparts a century before, thought of politics as an instrument of social change. Their guiding dogma was encapsulated in the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders, issued in March 1968 in response to the riots of the summer of 1967. "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal," the Report announced, and called for government programs, including a guaranteed annual income, which "will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance."

But the Kerner Report was wrong on the facts, and its call for ever-bigger government proved to be out of line with majority opinion. As Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom point out, black progress in incomes, education, and jobs began in World War II, continued through the 1950s and 1960s, without Kerner-style government programs. The greater problem was behavioral. Daniel Patrick Moynihan roused a furore when, in 1965, as Assistant Secretary of Labor he wrote a report pointing out that 23 percent of black births were to unmarried women; there were similar trends, Moynihan pointed out, among the 19th century Irish. In the 1990s more than half of black births are to unmarried mothers, and most black children are raised in homes without a father present.

Fatherless families, nurtured by generous welfare programs, produced an urban underclass which no one in 1968 expected, and for which the medicine prescribed by the Kerner Report turned out to be iatrogenic. Crime tripled in America between 1965 and 1975. About half of all crimes were committed by blacks—and about half of all victims were blacks. Welfare dependency tripled between 1965 and 1975, and about half of those on welfare were black. High crime and high welfare dependency in turn devastated many black central city neighborhoods. Housing values plunged toward zero, wiping out the equity of black homeowners and denying them the opportunity most Americans have to accumulate wealth. School busing orders resulted in flights from central city public schools, some of which have fewer than half as many pupils as they did 30 years ago.

Long-serving black mayors like Coleman Young of Detroit and Marion Barry of Washington built large city payrolls for their supporters, bludgeoned large corporations for big building projects and the federal government for grants, and refused to condemn crime by blacks on the grounds that that was "blaming the victim." But their policies resulted in ruinously high taxes, spiralling crime rates, and whole neighborhoods burned out and abandoned, as residents—black as well as white—voted against them with their feet. The policies of racial quotas and preferences, started in the Nixon administration and now institutionalized by self-congratulating government, university, and corporate elites, did open up opportunities for some. But they have also left a pall of illegitimacy over the genuine achievements of the intended beneficiaries and a claim of right for special treatment. These policies proved harmful because they did not provide the moral tutelage that private charities, settlement houses, and community voluntary associations provided for the Irish and other immigrants of 100 years ago. And they have tended to perpetuate the habit of mind that regards the moral claims of the larger society to be illegitimate—the greatest handicap faced by the Irish and the blacks.

Even so, progress is being made. Discrimination against blacks in jobs, public accommodations, and housing is very much less than it was 30 years ago. As the Thernstroms point out, the black middle class has kept growing, often moving to the suburbs, and intact black families are earning incomes equivalent to those of intact white families with similar levels of educational achievement. Since around 1993, crime and welfare dependency have been decreasing on as steep a curve as the one on which they rose in the awful decade of 1965-75, as officials around the country copy the welfare reforms of Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and the crime-fighting tactics of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. People learn from experience. The voters of Detroit and Washington have replaced Young and Barry with mayors who are working to cut city payrolls, cut crime, and provide better services. All this is evidence that the habits of mind blacks brought from the rural South are being changed, as the habits of mind of Irish immigrants were changed after years of living in a fundamentally fair, if flawed, society. It took 120 years from their initial inrush for the Irish to be fully interwoven into the fabric of American society. There is still reason to hope that it will not take as long for the American blacks whose mass migration began 60 years ago.

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The Italians who began emigrating in a rush from the impoverished southern Italy in the 1880s and the Latinos—a better word, I think, than Hispanics—who began emigrating in a rush from Latin America in the 1970s had many things in common. Both were descendants of subjects of the Emperor Charles V, who was King of Naples and, as King of Spain, the ruler of most of Latin America. Both came from polities of ineffective centralism, with governments that purported to supervise all areas of life but which seldom did so consistently or reliably. Both came from societies with low levels of trust and social capital, to use Francis Fukuyama’s terms, in which people trust their families, but mistrust, for good reason, all other institutions—government, military, the church, business, labor unions. They arrived with little experience with voluntary civic associations in which America has been so rich at least since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville.

The Italian immigration to America came in a rush. Only 70,000 Italians came here before 1880, but they were followed by 807,000 in the next two decades and by 3 million between 1900 and 1914. Nearly 80 percent came from southern Italy, which in those years was "rigidly stratified," wrote historian Richard Alba, and "essentially rural, with most of its people eking out an existence in agriculture" under a system "that still bore the evident imprint of its feudal past." Northern Italy’s vibrant civil society has roots in the independent city-republics of the 1100s, political scientist Robert Putnam has written, while southern Italy under the autocratic rule of Norman kings and the Emperor Frederick II never developed mediating institutions or the habit of initiative. The late Edward Banfield described southern Italian culture as "amoral familism," with social ties and moral obligation limited to the nuclear family. Political power in southern Italy was held by an indolent monarchy and powerful barons, by jaded bureaucrats and organized criminal organizations—the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Camorra in Campagna—thrived, and the economy remained stagnant even as northern Italy industrialized.

It was from this bleak background that most Italian immigrants came to the United States. The vast majority landed in New York harbor and settled in the area; today most Italian-Americans still live within 100 miles of Manhattan. They lived in "Little Italies," with different streets dominated by immigrants from particular provinces, who spoke in often mutually incomprehensible dialects. These "urban villagers" worked mostly in manual labor jobs, often in construction or on the docks; some worked as barbers, shoemakers, stonemasons, shopkeepers. Many found work from a padrone, a labor contractor who charged a fee for sending them off to work sites. Most Italian immigrants were men, who sent most of their wages back to their families; many returned back to Italy, while others brought their families over. Women worked too, often at piecework in their apartments; in Italian villages, wives did not have contact with strange males. It was a harsh life of pane e lavoro, bread and labor, in which families trusted only in each other and in hard work.

The Italian immigrants did not trust the major institutions of America any more than those in southern Italy. This included the Catholic Church; the Kingdom of Italy was not recognized by the Pope, and many immigrants were anticlericals, men who never went into a church after their first communion. In any case, the American Catholic Church was run by the Irish, and few Italians became priests; the first Italian-American bishop was not appointed until 1954.

Nor did the Italian immigrants trust schools. Dropout rates were high, and there were few Italian high school or college graduates. "Fesso chi fa i figli meglio di lui," ran an Italian proverb: stupid is he who makes his children better than himself. Boys were encouraged to work as soon as possible, to bring money into the family; girls were kept home, rather than be exposed to unsuitable young men; both were encourage to find spouses from good Italian families. Italians created few ethnic welfare organizations, except for some small mutual benefit societies; they had little interest in labor unions; Italian groups concentrated instead on building statues of Columbus, Mazzini, Verrazzano, Garibaldi, and Verdi.

Nor did Italian immigrants enter quickly into politics. Southern Italians wanted a strong state to keep order, but they placed little reliance on what they called "lo stato ladro," the state-thief. The Yankee-dominated Republicans and Irish-dominated Democrats had little appeal. In some cities, like New Haven, Italian voters, shut out by the Democrats, became Republicans; in others they became strong Democrats, as in Cleveland, whose Italian-American Mayor Anthony Celebrezze became the first Italian cabinet member as late as 1962. The most successful Italian politicians had atypical backgrounds, notably New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who was half-Jewish and Episcopalian and whose strongest ethnic support was from Jews. It was not until the 1950s that an Italian, Carmine de Sapio, became leader of Tammany Hall.

Yet the Italian-Americans in time began to assimilate. By the late 1930s, when sociologist William Whyte observed gangs in the Italian North End of Boston, he distinguished between "corner boys" and "college boys," members of gangs who hung out together and boys who concentrated on school work in search of upward social mobility. The spectacular success of some Italian-Americans showed that upward mobility was possible; these included LaGuardia and Ferdinand Pecora, the Senate counsel who won national headlines in 1933 for his investigation of Wall Street; they also included Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, who became national celebrities as young men in the late 1930s. Other Italian-Americans made negative headlines—the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s. Other immigrant groups produced criminal gangs, but the Italians did so just as Prohibition produced opportunities for enormous profits. The shock of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 (with a death toll that would not produce headlines today, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in Defining Deviancy Down) and the fame of Al Capone helped create an image that has proved irresistible to movie producers and television programmers—and a stereotype with a prominence disproportionate to its actual magnitude.

World War II played a critical part in Italian-Americans’ rise. There was little sympathy for Mussolini’s regime among Italian-Americans, and many were outraged when, after Mussolini invaded France in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt said, "The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor"—not because of its political content but because it evoked the stereotype of Italians as criminals. Hundreds of thousands of Italians served in America’s famously multiethnic military. When the returned, many took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights; college attendance among Italians rose from 15 percent in 1940 to 30 percent in 1954 and 38 percent in 1960. They climbed the occupational ladder, earned higher-than-average incomes, and fanned out from Little Italy to the suburbs. They also became more involved in the Catholic Church, as the anticlericalism common in early 1900s southern Italy wore off. Though they voted for John Kennedy even more than Irish-Americans in 1960, they also, as hard-working homeowners, had conservative attitudes on many issues. Italians produced the highest ethnic percentages for Conservative Senator James Buckley in 1970 and voted against Mario Cuomo in the close elections of 1982 and 1994.

A prickly pride characterized many Italian-Americans, who were dismayed at the widespread portrayal of Italians as gangsters and the reputation of many Italian politicians as crooked. "Where would we find an honest Italian-American?" Richard Nixon was heard to say on the White House tapes. But he was brought down in the Watergate scandal in large part because of the efforts of Judge John Sirica, who handed down harsh sentences to the Watergate burglars, and Congressman Peter Rodino, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment. It was no accident when conservative Antonin Scalia was confirmed unanimously in 1984; what liberal senator wanted to vote against the first Italian Supreme Court Justice? At the same time, Italians were achieving great success in the private sector. Lee Iacocca became a national figure as President of Ford and CEO of Chrysler (and bestselling author) in the 1970s and 1980s; but he was only one of dozens of CEOs of Italian ancestry. By the 1980s Italians were thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of American life. It took 100 years.

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Latinos have lived in what is now the United States longer than any other identifiable group except American Indians. Spanish soldiers founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1609. Texas was part of Mexico until 1836, and the United States acquired California, Nevada, New Mexico, and most of Arizona after the Mexican-American War in 1848. But immigration from Mexico and other parts of Latin America was neglible for most of this country’s existence. The 1924 immigration act did not impose quotas on Western Hemisphere countries, but there was little immigration from south of the border, until the Mexican revolution and the instability that followed sparked an inrush of 700,000 from 1910 to 1930. There was an inrush from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power; more than 800,000 Cubans immigrated between 1959 and 1996.

These were examples of politically-motivated immigration. But most Latin immigration came from countries that, like southern Italy, had rapid population growth but lagged behind economically. The first inrush was of Puerto Ricans, who have been U.S. citizens since 1917. Almost all went to New York City, which had 70,000 Puerto Rico-born residents in 1940, 187,000 in 1950, and 613,000 in 1960. The peak year was 1952-53, when 58,500 arrived. But Puerto Rico’s economy grew rapidly in the 1950s, and net migration from Puerto Rico has been zero since 1961.

Latino immigration has increased on a smooth upward curve since the late 1960s (although one must caution that the figures here are, because of illegal immigration, much less reliable than the figures for immigration from Europe in the years up to 1924 or for Asian immigration today), with spikes upward from countries with political disturbances. It did not result from the Immigration Act of 1965, which did not lift but imposed quotas on Western Hemisphere immigration; those have been evaded by family reunification provisions and by the 1986 and 1995 amnesties for illegal immigrants. In the debate on the 1965 Act, "No one expected any increase in Western Hemisphere immigration," writes Nathan Glazer. Immigration from Latin America (all of the Western Hemisphere except Canada and the non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean) totalled 1.1 million in 1961-70, 1.7 million in 1971-80, 3 million in 1981-90, and 2.7 million in the six years 1991 to 1996. The increase from Mexico was even steeper, from 443,000 in 1961-70, to 837,000 in 1971-80, 1.65 million in 1981-90, and 1.65 million again in 1991-96. Overall, measured Latino immigration was 8.5 million in 1961-96, but in 1998 the Census Bureau estimated the total Latino population at 30 million; Latinos tend to have many children, and there were several million Hispanics in the United States in 1960, but obviously among the 30 million there are several million illegals and their U.S.-born offspring.

Latino immigrants have come from many different countries and from parts of Mexico with significant regional differences. But they all speak Spanish, and their local accents are much more similar than southern Italian dialects, and they all come from polities long characterized by ineffective centralism from the days when King Philip II sent out detailed directives that would not be received for nearly a year. Although theoretically democratic since the early 19th century, most Latin American countries have had political systems in which insiders have manipulated power and, often, fixed elections; dictatorships have been common, and the rule of Mexico since 1929 by the PRI party has in many respects been dictatorial in character. Business interests are typically intertwined with government; labor unions have had little independence. Nor has the Catholic Church always been a source of countervailing power. Mexico since 1929, like Italy between 1870 and 1929, has been an officially anticlerical nation; only recently were Mexican priests allowed to appear in public in clerical collars. Latin America has had few voluntary associations, and a weak civil society. Trust in institutions, and indeed trust in anyone outside the family, is very low.

Like the Italians, Latinos have moved mostly to a few large metropolitan areas. The overwhelming majority of Dominicans, like Puerto Ricans, headed to New York. The overwhelming majority of Cubans headed to Miami and to Hudson County, New Jersey. Mexicans had many more destinations, but the large majority of Mexican-origin Latinos headed to metropolitan Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and New York, with flows from certain Mexican states to certain American cities. One-third of America’s Latinos live in California; three-quarters live in one of six states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. The Latino percentages of residents in 1998 were 31 percent in California, 30 percent in Texas, 15 percent in Florida, 14 percent in New York, 12 percent in New Jersey, and 10 percent in Illinois.

What America’s Latinos do more than anything else is work. The Hispanic male work force participation is 80 percent, higher than any other measured group. On street corners on the west side of Los Angeles at seven o’clock any weekday morning you will see groups of Latino men waiting silently at every street corner: they are looking not for welfare but for work. Labor contractors, like the Italian padrones, arrange jobs. Go into the deserted-looking four-story buildings in the garment center just south of downtown Los Angeles or into the 1950s factory buildings of South Central, and you will see dozens of Latinos busily working. Venture into the bungalows of the entry points of Latino immigrants, in Boyle Heights or Santa Ana, and you will see bunk beds where people sleep in three shifts. "Latinos have a strong work ethic and strong loyalty to employers," says East Los Angeles real estate developer Jose Legasapi. Their attitude is, "I’m asked to do this job, and I go and do it. If I need more money, I’ll get an extra job." The flow has largely been into private sector, not public sector, employment, and into small more than large firms; despite the 1960s example of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, there has been little movement toward unionization. Instead, they develop bonds with their employers and, as Roberto Suro describes it in Strangers Among Us, recommend relatives and friends from their home villages to them—but only if they’re confident they will work hard as well. Coming from countries where they saw no reason to trust large institutions, Latinos are reluctant to trust large institutions here. Instead they rely on their willingness to work.

And every year hundreds of thousands of Latinos are literally working their way out of poverty. In 1994 Hispanic income per person was only 57 percent of the national average—though that sum was far above the average in any Latin country. But Hispanic household income was 73 percent of the U.S. average, thanks to multiple workers and multiple jobs. In Los Angeles County, Pepperdine University researcher Gregory Rodriguez found that the household income of U.S.-born Latinos was above the county average. Latino immigrants may head first for low-income entry neighborhoods, but they have quickly fanned out into working-class and middle-class neighborhoods through metropolitan areas, avoiding only fashionable neighborhoods with inflated house prices; the west side has the lowest Hispanic percentages in all of greater Los Angeles.

Latinos work, most of all, for their families. As with the Italians, so with Latinos, many men come to the United States without their families, to establish a beachhead and often with an intention to return sooner or later to their home villages. In the meantime, they remit a large share of their earnings to their families back home: remittances are a major component of the gross domestic products of Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and much of Central and South America. In time many family members follow. A larger percentage of Latinos than of native-born whites live in father-mother-children families; the divorce rate among Latinos is significantly lower than that of the rest of the population. Crime rates, while above the national average, are well below those of blacks. In the Los Angeles riot of 1992, there was rioting in neighborhoods in Hollywood, settled by recently arrived immigrants from violence-torn Central America; but there was no rioting at all in more well-established Latino areas in East Los Angeles, South Central, the San Fernando Valley, or Santa Ana.

Where Latinos have lagged behind is in education—and in politics. The Latino school dropout rate in the 1990s, like the Italian dropout rate in the 1910s, is well above average. Performance on standardized tests tends to be low. Latino immigrant families put more trust in hard work than in college degrees. In addition, so-called "bilingual" education, in which almost all instruction is in Spanish, does not prepare students for test-taking in English. The New York public schools early in this century insisted that every student learn English. The Los Angeles Unified school district in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on maintaining unionized jobs for Spanish-speaking teachers.

Political participation by Latinos has been the exception rather than the rule. In Latin countries ordinary people avoid politics, and that habit of mind has followed them to America. The prime exception is the Cuban-Americans of Miami, drawn originally from the upper and middle ranks of Cuban society, possessed of a stinging grievance, who have gotten presidential candidates—not least Bill Clinton in 1996—competing for their support. Still, they remain heavily Republican, and watching the spirited oratory, all in Spanish, of Republican candidates in a shopping center parking lot in Hialeah in 1998, I almost felt that I was watching seeing something akin to a rally for Fiorello LaGuardia at Pleasant Avenue and 116th Street in East Harlem. In other areas Latino turnout has been low. Puerto Ricans have some of the lowest turnout on the American Mainland—though Puerto Rico itself has the highest voter turnout under the American flag. In Los Angeles’s 33d Congressional District, only 61,000—less than 10 percent of residents—voted in the 1996 presidential election, compared to 226,000 in the nearby westside 29th District. And this was after an upturn in 1996, as Latinos sought naturalization after California’s 1994 Proposition 187 denied welfare benefits to non-citizens and as the Clinton administration processed naturalization requests so speedily that it let pass thousands with criminal records. The Latino vote in California increased from 10 percent to 14 percent of the total between 1994 and 1998, and went 78 percent for Democrat Gray Davis in the governor race. That was a response to 187, not so much to the substance but to the campaign ad that Republican Governor Pete Wilson ran, showing Mexicans running across the border and proclaiming ominously, "They just keep coming." As Jose Legaspi put it, "He was saying we don’t work hard." Just as Italians were outraged by Roosevelt’s "hand that held the dagger" comment, so were California Latinos outraged by the suggestion that they were migrating only to get welfare—in each case, responding with prickly pride to an unfair negative stereotype.

But that move toward the Democrats in California was not matched elsewhere. Instead, Latinos vote differently in different parts of the country. Latinos voted heavily for Republican Jeb Bush (who is completely fluent in Spanish) in Florida in 1998. About half of Latinos voted for George W. Bush (who speaks Spanish well enough to have held a press conference in Mexico City) in Texas that year. Republican Senator John McCain carried the Latino vote in Arizona in 1998, and Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani carried a large minority of Latinos (despite the heavily Democratic allegiance of Puerto Ricans) in New York City in 1995. In the runup to the 2000 presidential elections several candidates—George W. Bush, John McCain, Al Gore, Bill Bradley—have all been making spirited efforts to appeal to Latinos, and Latinos could very well be the key to California’s 54 electoral votes.

Will Latinos become interwoven into American life as the Italians were by the 1980s? Almost certainly: yet there are difficulties. "Bilingual" education has prevented many Latinos from gaining the fluency in English necessary for more than menial jobs. Fortunately, in June 1998 Californians voted for Proposition 227, which sets a one-year limit to "bilingual" education unless parents seek an exemption, and despite the efforts of unionized Spanish-speaking teachers’ unions and of separatist-minded school bu reaucrats, few parents have sought exemptions. The more important barrier is the sheer number of Latinos. Italians were never the largest single ethnic group in major cities; Latinos are. Ten million Latinos live in California, nearly 6 million in Texas; 6 million Latinos live in metro Los Angeles metropolitan area—more people than live in most American states. It is easy in many neighborhoods to go about one’s way all week speaking only Spanish, and Spanish-language radio and television have large audiences.

Nor can we seen on the horizon the kind of annealing event that World War II was for Italian-Americans. But neither is it to be supposed that Latino immigrants will continue to arrive in their current numbers forever. Net immigration from Puerto Rico stopped in 1961, just as immigration from England and Germany fell off in the 1880s; net immigration from Latin countries will taper off toward zero when their economies reach takeoff level and civil liberties seem firmly established. Most Latin countries have moved in that direction since the 1980s, and already immigration from the most securely affluent and democratic nations—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay—is no greater than from affluent countries in western Europe. The likelihood is strong that Latinos will become thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of American life. With luck, it will take less than 100 years.

*

The Jews who began immigrating in a rush from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and many of the Asians who began immigrating in a rush from East Asia in the 1970s had much in common. They were persecuted peoples, who had lived—always in the case of the Jews, often in the case of the Asians—as distinct and often despised minorities in countries ruled by autocrats and conquerors. They lived in polities with a certain oppressive order but also given to bouts of internal warfare and slaughter; polities with low levels of trust. They were highly competent in commerce, though often consigned to manual labor, and had ancient traditions of literacy and learning and argumentation. They understood the lesson that Michael Novak has taught, that success in commerce requires honesty and reliability, and they were highly competent at forming voluntary civic associations.

The Eastern European Jewish immigration to America came in a rush. Sephardic Jews emigrated to colonial America, to the tolerant commercial colonies of Rhode Island, South Carolina, and New York; the first American synagogue was established in 1695. By 1880 there were perhaps 250,000 Jews in the United States—the numbers are never precise because the Census does not tabulate by religion—mostly from Germany. Here they rose rapidly in commerce, achieved social prominence but never entire acceptance, and created Reform Judaism.

Then came the inrush in the 1880s of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews from the shtetls of the Russian Empire and other parts of Eastern Europe. Between 1885 and 1914, 3 million immigrants arrived from Russia, about three-quarters of them Jews; perhaps another 1 million Jews arrived from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and other countries. This flow was interrupted by World War I, but in the years from 1920 until 1924, another 400,000 Jews arrived; at that rate, if the 1924 immigration act had not shut off immigration, more than 1 million more Jews would have left before 1939, and would not have perished in the Holocaust. For me, this remains the single strongest argument against immigration restrictions: never again.

These immigrants were descendants of the Jews invited to Poland in the 14th century, to settle a mostly empty land and provide a commercial class in an agrarian society. Most had been absorbed into the Russian Empire when Poland was partitioned in the late 18th century and confined by the Tsarina Catherine to a Pale of Settlement matching the old Polish boundary. The Polish province of Galicia, which went to Habsburg Austria, also had a large population Jewish population, and produced many immigrants. The Jews of the Russian Empire lived mostly in shtetls, self-contained rural villages. Russia was an autocracy, in which no one had political rights, in which the Tsar had absolute power over government and the Russian Orthodox Church. Jews could not own land, were not permitted outside the Pale, were subject to the 25-year military draft and to forcible conversion. Further restrictions followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881; Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II were vehemently antisemitic (in contrast to the philosemitic Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I), and it was tsarist police who in the 1890s fabricated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jews were the victims of pogroms, in which rioters injured and killed Jews and destroyed their property. Authorities did nothing to stop the Kishinev pogrom in April 1903, and government police issued pamphlets spurring on the pogroms of October 1905. The Orthodox Church often joined in the persecution.

Not surprisingly, after each round of restrictions and pogroms, thousands of Russian Jews made their way, often illegally, to Hamburg and other ports and embarked for America. Annual Russian immigration averaged 4,700 in the late 1870s, 33,000 in the late 1880s, 200,000 in the years from 1906 to 1914. At the same time, many Jews became socialists; a large share of the leaders of socialist and revolutionary parties were Jews. It may seem a paradox that a people under attack from the state, and a people whose small accumulations of wealth were made in free market transactions, should embrace an enlarged and more powerful state as a solution. But Marxist doctrine enabled Jews to escape their status as non-Christians and identify with gentiles as fellow members of an oppressed proletariat.

In America the Eastern European Jews, with their Orthodox ritual and dress, their Yiddish language and Socialist sentiments, their poverty and poor education—only half were literate—were very different from America’s established Jews. But the shtetl was a kind of small city, and they came with commercial habits developed from years of lending and peddling, and with industrial experience in Russia’s clothing industry. They also had a tradition of learning, from reading the Torah and arguing about the Talmud, and a habit of forming voluntary associations. And they were here to stay. Almost none had any intention of returning to Russia: the Jews had the lowest rate of return of any immigrant group.

They came primarily to New York. There were large Jewish communities in other big northern cities, but by 1920 about half of American Jews lived in greater New York. At first they clustered largely in the Lower East Side, which in the first decade of the century became the most densely populated place on earth; as subways were built—the first line opened in 1906—they moved in huge numbers to Brooklyn and the Bronx. In New York they established a lively Yiddish culture, with Yiddish theater and comedians and competitive Yiddish newspapers; the circulation of the Daily Forward peaked at 175,000. They established hundreds of synagogues and hundreds of civic associations, from local welfare aid committees to national organizations. They worked mostly in manual labor jobs, and particularly in the garment industry, but they also established thousands of small businesses, some of which became very large indeed—though usually remaining family-owned. Jewish rates of crime were low (though there was Jewish organized crime) and Jewish rates of alcoholism almost nonexistent.

"Around the world, wherever they went," Nathan Glazer wrote in the 1960s, "the Jews of Eastern Europe became in large proportions businessmen. Too, wherever they went, they showed a fierce passion to have their children educated and become professionals." Not all Jews achieved instant academic success—in World War I Jews had lower than average test scores—but their rise through education was astonishing. Jews worked their way up through the public schools of New York and other cities and into the elite universities, to the point that Ivy League schools established Jewish quotas in the 1920s when their student bodies became 40 percent Jewish. From their experience of persecution, Jews acquired an acute sensitivity to the changing tastes of others: for in Russia it was literally a matter of life and death to understand the whims of the goyim. Jewish business success came most rapidly in fields where understanding the changing tastes of goyim was critical—in fashion, in retail, in the movies. And so you have the picture of Jews speaking accented English in fractured syntax producing the 1930s and 1940s movies, the universal popular culture which more than any other defined the American character. This was an experience unprecedented in world history: tens of thousands of second-caste people from a backward society became top people in the top country in the world in just one generation.

From Russia the Yiddish-speaking Jews brought Socialist and Zionist politics—both still recognizable in the political attitudes of Jewish voters today. Jewish workers of the early 20th century were quick to form and join unions, especially in the garment trades, and those unions in turn were the nucleus of the American Labor and Liberal parties, set up in the 1930s and 1940s to support Franklin Roosevelt and anti-Tammany candidates like Fiorello LaGuardia. For Jewish voters were uncomfortable with both the Irish-dominated Democrats and WASP-dominated Republicans of New York, and the competition for Jewish votes was central to New York—and, because New York was a marginal state in those years, national—politics from the 1920s to the 1950s. This swing vote was well to the left of the core constituencies of both parties on issues—social welfare programs and civil rights—and gave both parties an incentive to move left. Franklin Roosevelt, who narrowly beat a Jewish Republican in the 1928 governor’s race, was careful to court Jewish voters, and carried New York in the close elections of 1940 and 1944 with the support of some 80 percent of Jewish voters; the five boroughs of New York City in 1944 cast 7 percent of the nation’s votes, with probably one-third of those cast by Jews. The 1948 presidential race featured a three-way competition over who would most strongly support civil rights between Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, and Henry Wallace; the key target was not blacks, but Jews, who then cast many more votes in New York and nationally.

The rising importance of the Jewish vote and the increasing prominence of Jews in public life led to fears of rising antisemitism. Charles Lindbergh and other opponents of U.S. involvement in World War II charged that American Jews wanted to risk American lives to save foreign Jews. Such charges of dual loyalty, and polls showing rising antisemitism, help explain why Roosevelt and others were hesitant about targeting the death camps or publicizing the Holocaust. After the war, there were worries that the large number of Jews in the Communist Party—and there were very many, as Theodore Draper showed—would prompt charges that Jews generally were disloyal. This was one reason why many Jewish liberals worked to oust Communists from important posts in labor unions and the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years. And when the Rosenbergs were prosecuted for espionage it was Irving Saypol who led the prosecution and Irving Kaufman who presided over the trial and handed down the death sentences. By the 1950s, Jews had proved they were loyal Americans beyond any doubt.

Also by the 1950s, Jews achieved income levels high above the national average—so high that Jewish leaders opposed publication of a 1957 pilot census asking people’s religion. But, unlike the Irish and Italians, they did not trend Republican: political scientists have found that Jews are the one group who vote consistently against their economic interest. Some of this may be defensive: many Jews fear that gentiles will resent their success, and therefore favor redistribution of income and wealth. Another motive was to protect the Jewish state of Israel: in the immediate postwar years Democrats were more pro-Israel; later, in 1972 and 1980, Jews tended to vote for Republicans when Democratic presidential candidates seemed hostile to Israel. In the 1990s Jewish voters reacted very negatively to the prominence of Christian conservatives in the Republican party, and Jewish voters cast higher Democratic percentages than any group but blacks. In this one can hear echoes of the Russian experience. Habits of mind are shaped by family lore, and stories of forced conversions and persecution by the Orthodox Church have made Jews exquisitely sensitive to the involvement of conservative Christians in politics, just as Jews bristled this year when Southern Baptists announced a move to convert Jews. One could almost say that American Jews are still voting against the Tsar.

Yet antisemitism seems to have reached an historic low in America today. Intermarriage between Jews and gentiles has passed 50 percent, and many thoughtful Jews today worry publicly about the diminishing number of Jews due to intermarriage and small families. In the 1960s barriers against Jews in Ivy League universities, white-shoe law firms, large corporations, high- and middle-income neighborhoods, and fancy resort hotels pretty much vanished. Jewish political candidates have been elected in just about every kind of constituency; polls suggest that only a tiny handful of Americans would refuse to vote for a Jewish presidential candidate. While no one should ever forget the persecution Jews have suffered, Jews are more secure in the United States today than anywhere at any time in history. By the 1970s they had become firmly interwoven in the fabric of American life. It took about 80 years.

*

Unlike Latinos, Asians have not lived in the United States from time immemorial, except for the native Hawaiians who are part of the Census classification of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Chinese laborers, 90 percent of them males, came to California after the Gold Rush of 1849; they were 9 percent of the state’s population in 1870 and 1880, but nativist agitation led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and their numbers dropped. Between 1884 and 1906, some 300,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawaii and California to work as agricultural laborers; many returned to Japan. California politicians demanded a Japanese Exclusion Act, but the Japanese government protested bitterly, and Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907-08, in which Japan barred emigration of male workers and the United States agreed to allow family reunification. Then the 1924 immigration act cut off Asian immigration completely, except from the Philippines, which was a U.S. territory at the time.

The immigration act of 1965 ended exclusion and quotas, partly because, as Nathan Glazer writes, "No one expected—or wanted—any great change in the volume of immigration. Even though China and India were now on exactly the same footing as England, France, or Germany, it was in truth not expected that the sources of American immigration would change much, aside from demonstrating that the United States did not discriminate against Asians." But there was an almost immediate inrush of immigrants from Asia. Asia produced 445,000 immigrants in 1961-70, 1.6 million in 1971-80, 2.8 million in 1981-90, and 1.9 million in the six years 1991-96, for a total of 6.7 million. The largest number, 2.7 million, were from Southeast Asia; another 2.1 million were from East Asia; nearly 1 million came from South Asia and another 734,000 from the Middle East. The Census Bureau estimates there were 10 million "Asian and Pacific Islanders" in the United States in 1998, 4 percent of total population. California has 4 million Asians, 12 percent of its population; Hawaii has 756,000, nearly two-thirds of its population. Asians are clustered in other Western cities—Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix—in Houston and Chicago and in New York and the Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington.

Asians are a diverse group indeed, and the resemblance between Jewish and Asian immigrants is less close than between Irish and blacks or Italians and Latinos. And I confess that I know less about the different kinds of Asian immigrants than I do about the other groups. The closest resemblance is between Jews and recent immigrants from East and Southeast Asia—Chinese, including Taiwanese and overseas Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. All lived under the brutal Japanese occupation in World War II, and the Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese lived under foreign rule for much of the past century. Overseas Chinese have lived under threat of persecution everywhere they have gone, and Mainland Chinese—most immigrants are from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian—lived through decades of civil war and for 50 years under a Communist government which killed millions in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

During all this, they came to live in urbanized settings and developed commercial skills. They have lived in countries which, like the Tsar’s Russia, have low levels of what Fukuyama calls social capital and trust. But these are also societies with a high respect for learning, institutionalized in China’s mandarin elite. They they have a highly developed capacity for creating voluntary organizations within families or kinship groups or among people from the same village.

Like the Jews, these Asians have been starting businesses and show a fierce passion for education. They accumulate capital from rotating credit associations, which require a high level of trust, and have started thousands of family-owned retail and manufacturing businesses. Examples are familiar: the Korean groceries of New York, with their fruit meticulously displayed, the Chinese apparel factories of Los Angeles, adapting quickly to changes in fashion, the Vietnamese convenience stores of Orange County. In their drive for education, they avoid the troubled-plagued central city public schools and instead struggle to buy cheap houses in high-ranking suburban school districts. They have avoided the perils of "bilingual" education because few school districts are prepared to offer instruction in the many Asian languages. The Asian valedictorian has become a cliche and Asian students are a near-majority on campuses like Berkeley and Stanford. Like Jews, Asians are the victims of quotas at selective colleges and universities. They excel at standardized tests, doing better on math than verbal tests; they are especially numerous in high-tech industries.

Recent Asian immigrants come from countries in which governments often threaten their lives and can seldom be influenced, and they have entered the United States without the strong political convictions so many Jews brought from Russia. Korean and Vietnamese immigrants, strongly anti-Communist, tend to vote Republican; that tendency was strengthened in 1992, when Los Angeles civic leaders’ response to the riot was sympathy for the rioters and indifference to the Korean and other Asian shopowners whose property was destroyed. More recently California Asians have moved toward the Democrats. One reason was Proposition 187; Asians, with their experience with mandarin bureaucracy, have been adept at gaming systems and securing aid for the relatives who are not yet citizens. Also, the charges of illegal contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign by ethnic Chinese and the targeting of Chinese-American scientists as possible spies has alienated Asian political activists and perhaps Asian voters as well, as challenges to their legitimacy and loyalty.

But Asian voters, unlike Jews, do not seem to be faithful supporters of an ever-larger state. There is little trace in this half of the twentieth century of the strong fearful prejudice Asians encountered in the first half, nor anything comparable with the antisemitism of 50 years ago. Liberals—with their anti-Asian quotas and their indifference to the victims of ghetto rioting—seem to be more the adversaries than the friends of Asian immigrants. If American Jews sometimes seem to be voting against the Tsar, American Asians may turn out to vote against Mao. In any case, the interweaving of Asians into the fabric of American life seems to be proceeding rapidly. It seems likely to take considerably less than 80 years.

*

Foes of immigration today, like foes of immigration 100 years ago, fear that it will change the basic character of America. We cannot assimilate alien races, said the opponents of immigration 100 years ago—the alien races being Irish, Italian, Jewish. But over the last 100 years we have shown that immigrants can be interwoven into the fabric of American life. Despite ugly prejudice and ethnic name-calling seldom seen today, despite the disabilities immigrants brought with them—the Irish sense that the rules of the larger society were illegitimate, the Italian mistrust of institutions outside the family, the Jewish adherence to a faith that had long made them a target of persecution—despite all these things, assimilation occurred. The nation is stronger for it.

But, say opponents of immigration, we cannot do it again. We are not encouraging assimilation as we did in the early twentieth century, they charge. Partly true: racial quotas are asserted as a claim of right, "bilingual" education prevents children from mastering English, casual chatter about "multiculturalism," from a vice president no less, may convince immigrants they have no need to blend in—all these have retarded assimilation. But those policies are coming under attack, and assimilation proceeds. There is something contagious about American habits of mind.

The new immigrant masses, opponents of immigration argue next, are just too large to be assimilated. But immigration as a percentage of the nation’s population is far lower than it was early in this century. In the peak immigration year, 1907, 1.3 million immigrants arrived, 1.5 percent of the nation’s population of 87 million. In the peak immigration year of 1992, 1,004,000 immigrants arrived, just 0.4 percent of the nation’s population of 254 million. But these immigrants tend to cluster, it is said. But they clustered in the early twentieth century too. The things people say about Los Angeles today were said about New York City in 1914. New York has thrived and so will Los Angeles.

Finally, opponents of immigration argue that today’s minorities are bringing alien values, habits of mind inimical to America’s traditions of tolerance, civic involvement, and voluntary associations. But that was true of the immigrants of 100 years ago and, as I have tried to show, in very much the same way. The colonial folkways that David Hackett Fischer has described have persisted even as the ethnic composition of America has changed; people come to America not to r