A recent article in in The American Spectator badly mischaracterized our history when the author claimed that after 1965’s immigration reform “the quality of America’s immigrant intake has declined … Immigrants are less educated than they were in the past…. That burdens the country, but it’s very Heaven for an American aristocracy, which can hire cheap household labor.”

This screed not only ignores engineers and entrepreneurs who’ve led recent waves from India, China and elsewhere, but romanticizes our past. Millions arrived from Ireland, Poland, Italy and Greece but they weren’t well-educated or highly skilled; most were destitute laborers, like my Russian-Jewish, barrel-maker grandfather. And yes, some new arrivals provided “cheap household labor” like the old “Irish Washerwoman” in the famous song.

The problem for immigrants today isn’t their “low quality”; it’s the efforts by multi-culturalists on the left and restrictionists on the right to block their healthy progress toward assimilation and Americanization.