It's Saturday evening so I can't give this a full quality blog post (do I ever?) but I think it is fair to say that absent the various ways the US relaxed immigration restrictions (and Reagan's amnesty...and other ways in which immigrants newly obtained paths to citizenship... ) this country would be, well, horrible. Related is the fact that I used to be a bit smug about the fact that whatever Western Europe had going for it (many things, not all things!), we at least had that going for us. Cultural heterogeneity was our strength. Not a unique strength, of course, but not an entirely universal strength either. Now...