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Comment by chriserin | Hacker News Reader

That's a nice resource but I don't think it shows what you intended it to show. From that timeline all I gather is that the United States has always wavered between xenophobia and the need for labor.

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There were essentially four brief periods of high immigration in American history, usually lasting on the order of 20 years or less. Outside of those periods essentially zero immigration was the norm. From 1924 to 1965 immigration was zero (somehow business and technology advanced in America; not sure how). There were many such periods farther back.. Allowing only immigration from Western nations was the norm.

We are now in the fourth decade of an unprecedented experiment with extraordinarily high immigration. The length of this wave and the volume of newcomers dwarfs all previous waves. This is also the first experiment with high numbers of non-Westerners, who to all indications do not appear to be assimilating and intermarrying as previous waves did.

The lesson to take away from the history of American immigration is that immigration waves should be followed by long periods of zero immigration for assimilation.

Looking at the US Census data from 1850 onward (they didn't ask where you were born before the 1850 census), the percentage of the US population was a steady 13-14% from 1860 to 1920. In 1950 (they didn't ask in 1930 or 1940), it's down to 9% presumably from the changes in immigration law in the 1920s. Then it's around 5% for 1960-1980 and from 1990 starts to rise up to 12.48% today. That's roughly where the percentage of immigrants was for the 6 decades before 1920. That doesn't to me look like "an unprecedented experiment with extraordinarily high immigration"

Despite reaching replacement level fertility in the 70s, the population has continued to explode, and this is due entirely to immigration. This is historically unprecedented.

http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/sustainability/bigge...

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