The immigrants keep coming, and they're not assimilating. Unlike our immigrant ancestors, who came to America and never looked back, they still maintain ties to their old country, waving their foreign flags and reading their news in another language, bringing along cousins and friends from their village. Of course I'm talking about Basque shepherds, who settled the Rocky Mountains in the 19th century and continued to welcome new arrivals into their ethnic clubs more than 100 years later.
Almost everyone in this country has ancestors who came from somewhere else. So nativists are now arguing that immigration now is simply different from their ancestors' immigration. "A Peter Thiel point on this I return to often is that the settlers who became Americans in the 19th century were—for most intents and purposes—dead to the Old World," writes Micah Meadowcroft, research director at the national conservative Center for American Renewal. "Today, thanks to communication and transportation tech, migrants never have to fully leave home psychologically."
