It has been a month since the Orlando nightclub attack, which I hope is enough time that we can think about something other than how tragic it was (though of course the tragedy remains just as bad, if not as immediate, and my sympathies are with those who were touched directly).

Until 1965 it would have been impossible for someone like Seddique Mir Mateen to have emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States. Thus it would have been impossible for his son, Omar Mateen, to have been born and educated here at taxpayer expense. With the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, considerations of cultural compatibility were eliminated.

Syed Farook, the former San Bernardino County Department of Public Health food inspector, is another person who was here in the U.S. as a result of this 1965 law. His parents emigrated from Pakistan. (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his family provide another example, though the Tsarnaev brothers were not born in the U.S., only educated here in the Cambridge Public Schools.)

Plainly neither Mr. Farook nor Mr. Mateen developed any real fondness for the nation that adopted their parents. Both were likely guilty of what mainstream Americans would consider ThoughtCrime on a range of social subjects. This eventually led to a violent end for both men. Yet it seems possible that both could have fit in reasonably well back in their parents’ homelands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their beliefs would likely not have been out of step with neighbors’ beliefs in those countries. We didn’t do ourselves any favors by admitting their parents, but the full scale of the waste is apparent only when we reflect that we didn’t do Mr. Farook or Mr. Mateen any favors either.

I’m wondering if we are so biased in favor of our own culture that we can’t understand that there are people on the planet for whom prevailing U.S. culture would not be their first choice. If so, at least as long as we maintain our culture-blind immigration policy (plus a few generations beyond), we are doomed to be repeatedly shocked by events similar to those in Orlando and San Bernardino.