There's nothing wrong with liking your culture and wanting to preserve it, with wanting it to succeed. If that makes me a "culturalist" or "culturist" or whatever, then I'll wear the label proudly. When my family moved to this country, they decided to become Americans. That doesn't mean abandoning your heritage, or forgetting it--I love Cuban food, poetry, music, history, and humor--but it does mean embracing the society you moved to and raising your children in its values. Some of what we brought will seep into general American culture, and the rest will be relegated to the history books within a couple generations. That's the melting pot.

Mass migration to Europe from the Middle East is an unmitigated disaster, even before the current refugee crisis. France in particular is a good example of what can really go wrong with unmanaged immigration. You have second and third generation Muslims becoming more fundamentalist than their parents, developing incredible animosity toward the rest of France (and receiving it too). Without pointing fingers at whose fault it is, the French or the immigrants, it's a total disaster for both. It frankly doesn't matter whose fault it is, it should have never been allowed to happen. I'm incredibly alarmed that the left in America is totally and willfully blind to those risks. They call you racist and shout you down if you dare challenge them. They're promising to bring in hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East. It will be millions if it goes the way of other promises that the American people have gotten on immigration.

We need to be very careful. We should accept the best and brightest from these countries. But we cannot repeat the horrible mistake that the Europeans have made.

Uncontrolled mass migration is new to America. For the first sixty years of the Republic, there was almost no immigration. Then until the early 1920s, immigration was mostly restricted to Europeans, who already had a great deal in common culturally with Americans. Then from the early 20s until the 1965 Immigration Act, there were strict quotas imposed per country-of-origin that slowed immigration to a trickle. (Though mass illegal immigration does predate the 1965 act by a few years, I believe.)

>And it is this exact effect that made the US such a powerhouse - in the early 1900s they absorbed millions of the worlds brightest and best who then built the miracle that was 1950/60s America. Then they started putting the breaks on immigration, and... oh dear, the economy is faltering! Why ever could that be?

The mass migration from Mexico into the US is not the brightest and most talented, it's Mexican peasants. There's nothing wrong with being a Mexican peasant, and I wish the best for them. The ones who are now my countrymen deserve the same consideration and acceptance as any American. But America does not need to import millions of peasants. They're a total mismatch for what our country needs, which is high-skill labor. We have enough low-skill workers that can't find jobs. I don't see how we benefit from adding more. Especially people with very low expectations for wages and the employer-employee relationship. Mexican poverty is Mexico's problem. Why do we need to make it America's problem too? We have our own problems to solve.

No one thinks the economy is faltering because we're not allowing enough immigration from Mexico. The idea is frankly a little ridiculous.

It didn't have to be this way. The American people have been making their views on this uncontrolled migration, on the wink-wink approach to illegal immigration in particular, very clear for a long time. They were sold a massive amnesty in 1986 in exchange for increased enforcement. It was a great humanitarian act, worthy of a great nation. It also ended up being a total and brazen lie by the politicians. The Democrats are happy to keep importing voters and the Republicans are happy to importing cheap labor. All while swindling the people. Time's up.