Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the career or present presidential campaign of former speaker Newt Gingrich know him to be a man whose rhetoric knows no boundaries, either of accuracy or common decency. He is equally likely to attack his opponents from the left or the right and thinks little of smearing his opponents if he thinks he can profit from it. Read more...

Characterizing someone as "anti-immigrant" is an easy way to demonize those whose views you disagree with and to assault the legitimacy of their views. In the world of immigration policy and theory it is the equivalent of tar and feathers. Many who use this meme clearly hope that the term will someday rival "racist!" as an epithet of opprobrium and silencing. Read more...

As anyone who follows politics knows, the last few years have seen an explosion of web sites that purport to fact-check the claims that are ubiquitous features of American political life. Their standard operating procedure is to take a phrase or a political or policy claim and assess its validity. They all have rating scales of which the following is typical: Read more...

The New York Times reports that Herman Cain was just joking, seriously, about electrocuting illegal border crossers.

Moreover, he chastised Americans for not getting the joke. "America needs to get a sense of humor," he said. Really.

The complete exchange from Meet the Press: Read more...

If you follow politics for any length of time and what those in positions of political leadership sometimes say, you cannot be surprised to come across verbal missteps, rhetorical excesses, logical inconsistencies, or flat-out wrong information.

And then there is the recent immigration policy suggestion by GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. Read more...

Europe's turn from multiculturalism has, as we have been noting, implications for the United States and its policies for helping new legal immigrant become American. Prime Minister David Cameron's detailed critique of his country's failed efforts to enlist multiculturalism to further that goal provides some cautionary lessons. Read more...

Like much else in American society, the development of organizations that help new immigrants has proceeded in an ad hoc way. That is part of the nature of our society noted as long ago as Alexis de Tocqueville's trip to the United States in 1831. The general rule of American culture has been that voluntary associations spring up to address civic needs. Read more...

Among the many important, useful, and neglected recommendations of the 1997 report of the Barbara Jordan Commission was the following (p. 29, emphasis added):

The Commission believes that the federal government should take the lead and invite states and local governments and the private sector to join in promoting Americanization.

It further recommended (p. 34, emphasis mine) that state governments be encouraged to set up resource centers in local communities that, Read more...

Among the several lessons that British Prime Minister David Cameron's critique of multiculturalism provides for the United States are his observations on the role of non-governmental organizations in helping to either facilitate or compromise new immigrant integration into Britain's cultural and national community. Read more...

The crumbling of the heretofore-taboo subject of the impact of multiculturalism on immigrant assimilation opens up a critical question for debate. That question is premised on the reality that immigration into the western democracies from all parts of the world will continue to be a fact that these governments must address. The question is how best to do so. Read more...

Those with liberal views and short memories often urge Americans to learn from Europe when it comes to building a fairer and more just society and a foreign policy stance that avoids unilateralism and empire. The implication of this position was not only that American had much to learn, but a great deal to emulate.

Given Europe's financial problems, less talk is heard along those lines these days. And there is growing appreciation that Europe's call for a more "world community"-friendly foreign policy stance is a luxury made possible by American military capacity and protection. Read more...

Multiculturalism in the United States has a long silent history. The United States has, from its founding, taken in immigrants from different cultural backgrounds, many of whom were, at the time, controversial. First, it was the Germans who raised questions about whether they could or would become "real Americans." Then questions were raised about the Chinese and after them Irish and the Eastern European immigrants. Now it is Hispanic-Americans and Muslim-Americans of whom we ask those questions. Read more...

There are some things that are simply not easily or widely discussed in immigration debates in the United States and abroad, and the virtues of multiculturalism are among them. I have called them taboo immigration topics not because there are explicit prohibitions against discussing them, but because in all the myriad contemporary American immigration policy debates it is very rare to find any discussion of them. The silence is not accidental. Read more...

The Washington Post's Next Great Pundit puts a great deal of faith in the report he touts from the Kaufmann Foundation in his comparison of immigrant-rich Detroit (good) with immigrant-poor Cleveland (bad). Yet that report actually had this to say about Detroit: Read more...

Connor Williams, winner of the Washington Post's contest for "America's Next Great Pundit 2010", is a master of non sequiturs, at least if his opinion piece entitled "The Midwest Needs Immigrants" is representative. Read more...

In reading through the many commentary pieces related to our national immigration debates, it's worthwhile to start to draw some distinctions. There are those rare successful efforts to make sense of a specific immigration issue whose analysis leaves you more informed than when you started. There are those with which you essentially agree, but which are not much help in advancing your understanding because they essentially restate conclusions you have already reached. Read more...

Hyphenated American identities have helped many millions of new legal immigrants to the United States, from every continent in the world, find their way eventually to becoming full-fledged members of our national community. So why do we seem to have discarded that unparalleled record of success when it comes to America's largest and fastest grown new immigrant groups – "Hispanics"/"Latinos" ? Read more...

Hyphenation helps new immigrants resolve a very personal and consequential set of questions: How can I acknowledge who I am while at the same time recognizing the reality of a fresh start in a new country of whose community I would like to be a part? But it does more than this. Read more...

New legal immigrants have chosen the United States as their home in which to live and work, but it is not yet fully their country. Nor, can we expect it to be right away.

The new immigrant arrives having spent his childhood and formative years in his country of origin. She has absorbed its language, culture, and outlook, while at the same time having had an uncountable number of experiences that reinforce and deepened the connections among these elements. So that immigrant arrives here with an already formed identity. He or she is a Nigerian, a Chilean, a Vietnamese, and so on. Read more...

To understand the role of the hyphen in helping legal immigrants become Americans it is important to keep in mind its role in managing the emotional currents of the immigration process.

Immigration begins with the decision to give up a great deal to make a fresh start in a new country. For most immigrants this requires adjusting to a new culture, a new language, unknown economic prospects, and a lonely existence apart from family, friends, and community. Read more...

Theodore Roosevelt's hyphen animus was as mistaken as it was understandable. He had a country about to go to war and 23 million new immigrants, most of them from the very continent where the war was being fought. And some of these immigrants had mixed feelings about plunging into a conflict that reignited complex feelings about their former home countries. Read more...

One of the most successful tools in the arsenal of assimilation is barely noticed. It is not as obvious as learning English. Its benefits are not as apparent as getting an education, or a job. But it has been instrumental in helping millions of immigrants make the emotional transition from their countries of origin to new attachments that are, in the best circumstances, part of becoming an American.

I am writing about the mighty hyphen. Read more...

Two recent pieces of commentary on the extremes of the immigration debate deserve recognition for casting light on immigration rhetoric that has no legitimate place in our discussions. Read more...

Some ideas are so astoundingly bad that it is not only hard to take them seriously, but also to understand how they could be seriously made. Which brings us to Nicholas Kristof's recent column entitled "Primero Hay Que Aprender Espanol, Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen," which translates to "First, one must learn Spanish. Then Learn Chinese." Read more...

Gregory Rodriguez put one of the most novel defenses of the recently defeated DREAM Act in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. He does not, of course, take up any of the glaring and egregious loopholes contained in the bill as written, but his argument is unusual enough to be considered on its own merits, or lack thereof. Read more...

The idea that the United States needs a temporary worker program is fast becoming conventional wisdom. The logic underlying this supposed need is well captured in an article by Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute. He writes, "The fact that 400,000 to 500,000 foreign born workers were joining the U.S. labor force illegally in years past indicates the general magnitude of the need for additional legal workers when the U.S. economy resumes normal growth. Read more...

With the decreasing likelihood of "comprehensive immigration reform," at least as it has been formulated to date, and the defeat of the so-called DREAM act, interested parties on all sides of the immigration debate are searching for new policy initiatives that can stand on their own and not be dependent on any "grand bargain" of amnesty and increased immigration in exchange for promises of enforcement. Read more...

What a difference a lame duck makes. At his press conference after the midterm elections, the president appeared subdued, acknowledged a "shellacking," and promised a renewed search for common ground.

Then, at his post-lame duck news conference, the president, according to one wag, went "from shellacking to swashbuckling." More importantly, the president clearly had recovered both his usual high level of self-confidence and his transformational ambitions. Read more...

Removing the most egregious loopholes in any revised dream act still leaves complex and difficult problems to be solved. Read more...

Debra Saunders makes the very good suggestion in her column on the most useful starting place for revising the DREAM Act: "If Republicans write the bill, [is that] they can make sure the Dream does not include egregious loopholes." She doesn't name the offending culprits, but they are obvious: Read more...