With an estimated addition of 1.8 million legal and illegal immigrants, 2016 is tied with 1999 for seeing the most enter, about 600,000 more than at the height of the great migration through New York’s Ellis Island in the 1900s.

Immigration expansionists who aren’t reporters, on both the right and left, have also weighed in. Technology immigration lobbyist Stuart Anderson, for instance, writes on “the myth of chain migration,” claiming that it’s “a contrived term that seeks to put a negative light on a phenomenon that has taken place throughout the history of the country.” His allies at People for the American Way call it “the anti-immigration movement’s term for policies that allow immediate families to stay together,” while Media Matters derides the term as “a misleading nativist buzzword.”

Of course, until ten minutes ago, “chain migration” was just the regular term for earlier immigrants’ sponsoring future immigrants.

[Just Don't Call It 'Chain Migration!' by Mark Krikorian, National Review, December 21, 2017]