I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever. ~Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s sarcastic remarks here are representative of the tenor and quality of the pro-immigration side of the argument, which is to say condescending and poor.  The quote above is particularly useful as a good example of the favourite pro-immigration tropes, related to the “nation of immigrants” rhetoric: border control is something relatively new and mass immigration of one sort or another has been happening for a long time.  They say this as if these were obviously and always good things.  There may have been times when more lax border control was more acceptable, when there was not a flood of labourers coming into the country each year, and there may have been times when mass immigration helped fuel American productivity when America had vast swathes of undeveloped land and insufficient manpower to make use of much of it.  

Pro-immigration advocates use these tropes as if the policies appropriate to the 1910s, 1810s, 1710s or 1610s were obviously the right policies for the present time.  There is no other area of policy where they would make such an argument (indeed, very few people would make such arguments about any area of policy).  It is surely only in the area of immigration where these proponents of mass immigration take the practices of a lightly populated colonial America, an expanding agrarian frontier society or an industrialising society from the past as prescriptive for the post-industrial present.  For many of these pro-immigration advocates, the religion, politics and prejudices of Americans over these centuries are embarrassing or even despicable, but their de facto approach towards immigration (with the exceptions of the interludes of “nativism”) is all right.  (Indeed, it is because they generally think so poorly of so much of the history of Old America that they want to constantly introduce new populations to continue transforming it away from that Old America.)  In every other way, pro-immigration advocates tend to regard every form of traditionalism, appeal to the past and imitation of past exempla as rigid, stodgy and backwards-looking.  They are wrong about all of these things, but curiously they have no problem dusting off ancient precedents to justify their present obsession. 

It is only on this policy question, the one where they happen to be stunningly wrong and outgunned by numerous social scientific arguments demonstrating the various social and economic problems created by current immigration policy (or lack thereof), that they discover the importance of venerable antiquity and the value of following the example of our ancestors.  Consequently, it is pro-immigration advocates who seem to be constrained by the blinders of myth and ideology.  This myth and ideology tell them that whatever was appropriate to the period of the frontier and continental expansion is also appropriate to our present society, despite its completely changed social and economic foundations.  When confronted with the far greater need for education to be able to flourish in modern society, they chant, not unlike war supporters prior to the invasion of Iraq who invoked WWII and the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan, “We have done it in the past, and we can do it again!”  That might make some sense, except that they show no evidence of knowing how to assimilate these immigrants, just as war supporters have never demonstrated any evidence that they know how to engage in successful democratisation or nation-building or any of the things that they claimed that “we” knew how to do so well.  Additionally, there is the problem that each successive wave changes who “we” are and makes the next period of assimilation less effective than the last.