A Thought on Immigration

One of the brief references in Gail Collins’ book, America’s Women, provided food for thought. Consider this issue that she referred to from the beginning of the twentieth century:

“The white middle class was worried about ‘race suicide.’ The best-educated native-born women were failing to reproduce while immigrant families had tons of healthy babies. President Theodore Roosevelt was a particular fretter: ‘If Americans of the old stock lead lives of celibate selfishness.....or if the married are afflicted by that base fear of living which....forbids them to have more than one or two children, disaster awaits the nation'.”

 
Recall that the immigrants of that era were Irish, Italian, Jewish, German and Scandinavian. How many of their descendants remember that they were once considered undesirable rabble? How many of their descendants are today worrying that too many Hispanics having too many babies are ruining their nation?