Patriotic firebreather VHD, darling of the neocons, has an editorial about illegal immigration online at Realclearpolitics.com. For a historian, he shows a remarkable lack of insight into events of the last twenty years, or more likely, distorts world history in order to provide support for his nativist worldview.
In the piece, VHD says:
Because the United States is increasingly less a majority of whites of European ancestry and more a mixture of dozens of races and ethnicities, the need for a common unifying language and culture has never been more important. When Americans look abroad at the violent messes in the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq, the notion of emphasizing separation here at home by race, tribe, language or religion makes absolutely no sense. But the idea of letting only enough legal immigrants in who can be easily assimilated surely does.
Every single example he cites argues against his thesis. In all of those countries, sectarian, tribal, and other differences were suppressed and ignored by a monolithic central government which forced an unified culture and language on a heterogenous population, only to have those identities fester into violent nationalistic and sectarian division decades later. Hanson's "solution" to American national identity is the same as Tito's and Saddam's, so there is no room to doubt that it would eventually lead to the same outcome. The Hoover Institute should get a new useful idiot.