Giving the Huddled Masses An Ambivalent Welcome

With pious devotion to diversity having become our civic religion, it’s blasphemous to voice fear of demographic change. In the privacy of the opinion-poll confessional, though, lots of people express such qualms. A study by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds Americans more likely to say the population surge of the 1990s was a bad thing (50 percent) than a good one (32 percent). That was most true of non-Hispanic whites, among whom “bad” beat “good” by 54 percent to 28 percent.