ABSTRACT
Acceptance of the creed depends on the particular immigrant group in question and the time at which various members of the group migrated to the United States. Concrete data with which to assess immigrant orientations are difficult to come by; few opinion polls or surveys are available to furnish the relevant information. Instead, political attitudes must be deduced from discrete sources: the history of immigrants in their homelands, the behavior of immigrants in America, and the testimony of immigrants themselves. The foregoing discussion has been consciously speculative. But if the case for immigration’s contribution to American political stability can be sustained, and prima facie evidence suggests it can, that America is a settler society may go far toward explaining the success of its experiment in democracy. If contribution to political stability alone is at issue, immigrants may well make better citizens than the native-born.
