The Conversation

How Much Immigration Is Too Much?

We need to make hard decisions now about what will truly benefit current and future Americans, David Frum argued in April.

David Frum’s statistically dense exploration of America’s immigration conundrum is an important and welcome antidote to the simplistic and xenophobic rhetoric of the president, which dominates the public discourse. Mr. Frum’s analysis, however, suffers from a fundamental omission. It ignores the elephant in the debate on immigration—xenophobia and racism.

Throughout our history, antagonism toward racial, religious, and ethnic minorities has dominated American immigration policy. Mr. Frum writes nostalgically of the period of slow immigration from 1915 to 1975. His analysis ignores the fact that racist immigration policies helped create this age of “cohesion.” It also ignores the fact that the United States economy during this period benefited greatly from the federal government’s enormous investment, and from