It is understandable that Donald Trump’s vulgar attack on immigrants has nicer people up in arms, and that pundits are leaping to their computers to chastise Ben Carson for saying he might not want a Muslim to be president of the United States. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if these comments opened the question of American immigration policy to review.

We must begin by dismissing the notion that our previous experience with immigration teaches us lessons applicable to the current influx, especially if that is to be composed mostly of thousands of young Muslim men, some of them fleeing Syria. Our past immigration history is not prologue.