Link: David Frum, who is a wobbly half-hearted restrictionist on immigration, seems to go full Trump, or at least full Coulter, in his latest Atlantic article:
Quote
Donald Trump’s noisy complaints that immigration is out of control are literally true. Nobody is making conscious decisions about who is wanted and who is not, about how much immigration to accept and what kind to prioritize—not even for the portion of U.S. migration conducted according to law, much less for the larger portion that is not.
Donald Trump, literally correct! This will ruffle some feathers.
Nervous about Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris massacre? How dare you! Would you turn away Jews fleeing Hitler? Oh, you think that analogy is hyperbolic? Tell it to the mayor of New York City.
Oy, vey! He said it! 
This frequent invocation of the refugee trauma of the 1930s shuts down all discussion of anything that has happened since. Since 1991, the United States has accepted more than 100,000 Somali refugees. Britain accepted 100,000 as well. Some 50,000 Somali refugees were resettled in Canada; some 40,000 in Sweden; smaller communities were settled in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark.
How’s that going?
It turns out it's a completely shambolic mess:
Meanwhile, terrist org Al Shabab (remove Shabab!) is recruiting aggressively from American Somalis. Among other things, it wants them to stage attacks on shopping malls like the Mall of America (which, trust me, could be a win-win for everyone).
As Frum–is there an echo in here?–documents, the Syrians fleeing their country are poorly educated and culturally unsuited to assimilate to Western society.
Germany in particular has tried to cope with this challenge by aggressively promoting low-wage work for the benefit of workers in the former East Germany and new immigrants. Some categories of work are exempted from standard benefit packages and minimum wage laws. But if first-generation migrants willingly accept this bargain, their children likely won’t. Unfortunately, while a new population’s expectations will rise in one generation, the accumulation of sufficient human capital to fulfill those expectations takes significantly longer. The predictable result: protracted underemployment across visibly identifiable subgroups of the population—group perceptions of inequity and injustice—resentment, radicalization, and criminal and political violence: the second-generation European Muslim experience in a one grim economic equation.
A perfect summation of the immigration problem. (And, as pointed out in the gumball video, it won't make a dent in third world suffering, because their population growth exceeds even the rosiest forecast of sustainable immigration levels.)
Frum's essay is not without problems. In attempting to sell a "not all immigrants" narrative–that immigrants separate into two tracks, with the higher track immigrants being an unadulterated boon–Frum misstates the real effect of H-1B immigration:
Those divides are highlighted by a massive new study by the National Academy of Sciences of the acculturation of new immigrants to the United States: “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.” The first reports on the study in October headlined comforting news: recent immigrants to the United States were assimilating rapidly—arguably more rapidly than their predecessors of the pre-1913 Great Migration. One must read deeper into the report to encounter the worrying question: Assimilate to what? Like the country receiving them, immigrants to the United States are cleaved by class. Approximately one quarter of immigrants arrive with high formal educational qualifications: a college degree or more. Their record and that of their children is one of outstanding assimilation to the new American meritocratic elite, in many ways outperforming the native-born. (The highest outcomes are recorded for immigrants from India: 83 percent of male immigrants from India arrive with a college degree or higher.) College-educated immigrants are more likely to be employed than natives, and their children are more likely to complete a college degree in their turn. Here is a mighty contribution to the future wealth and power of the United States.
In reality, the reason H-1Bs are more likely to be employed is that they can only get over here in the first place because they are sponsored by corporations. And the real effect is to displace college-educated Americans who have incurred large college debts getting to the point where they can compete on paper with degree mill bindis from Hyderabad. But they can't compete in practice because many American businesses still have a delusional (and amusingly racist) conception of the abilities of Indian and Chinese programmers.
But, as Frum points out, even if you buy into this super-immigrant rhetoric, the other side of the coin is much uglier:
By contrast, about one-third of immigrants arrive with less than a high-school education. Immigrants from Latin America—the largest single group—arrive with the least education: Only about 13 percent of them have a college degree or more. They too assimilate to American life, but to the increasingly disorderly life of the American non-elite. Their children make educational progress as compared to the parents, but—worryingly—educational progress then stagnates or retrogresses in the third generation. For many decades to come, Latino families educationally lag well behind their non-Latino counterparts.
In short, they become fatter, more criminal, and worse on virtually every other measure of success in life than they would have had they stayed behind. That's the power of assimilation.
