Mary Ann Glendon’s article in First Things:

Good-faith anxieties about large-scale immigration are sometimes expressed in terms of social costs, such as a feared deleterious effect on the nation’s cultural cohesion or the stability of local communities. One would like to take comfort from the fact that similar concerns were expressed at the time of the great migrations of a century ago. Though marked by conflict and competition, the story of those earlier immigrants is, to a great extent, a story of successful integration.

But American culture in those days was characterized by a broader set of common understandings. The picture is more complicated today, with large-scale immigration taking place at a time when it is harder to specify, and therefore harder for a newcomer to discern, a widely shared view of what it means to be American.

To make matters worse, the community structures and religious groups that once played crucial roles in integrating immigrants have themselves been weakened. The old Democratic-party political machines that once brought new citizens into the political process at the local level have vanished. In their place, a new immigrant today encounters political institutions that were developed in response to the black civil-rights movement of the 1960s. The newcomer from Mexico, Brazil, or El Salvador becomes a generic “Latino” in preparation for initiation into the game of divisive racial minority politics.