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I think Buchanan is right to point out that huge bodies of unassimilated immigrants in the long run doom any culture. Those who are protesting this piece are equally right to point out that Hispanics are in many ways more assimilable than Muslims but even there, a strong enough host culture under the pluralism originally envisioned by the Constitution could assimilate any Muslims willing to accept the principles. (Whether they would thereby necessarily embark on a path of secularization, I don't know--I think Islam makes it much harder to accept the pluralism-bargain we started out with. But it really doesn't matter much because we abandoned that approach to religious pluralism when SCOTUS started legislating public secularism.) I think that the fundamental problem is not how assimilable or unassimilable the immigrants are but whether the host culture still has enough cohesion to assimilate the newcomers.

France clearly does not. Old Europe has been hollowing out it's culture now for at least 200 years, since the French Revolution, if not before. Already by WWI it was an empty shell. It is a testimony to the edifice built by Christianity that it lasted for 500 years after being split in two culturally in the 1500s.

Our culture is not quite so deracinated, but is a long way down that path toward ruin. In order to assimilate Hispanics (and immigrant Muslims who wish to be assimilated--the others should not be permitted in--though how to distinguish them would be a nightmare and would be slapped down by the liberal thought police, which is one more reason why SCOTUS has to be transformed), we not only have to change border policy, get rid of silly multicultural and ethnic enclave education approaches etc. but we also have to find our way to some sort of consensus about what really holds us together as Americans. The Red-State/Blue-State divide is in many ways a cultural divide, with Blue-Staters in many cases taking a self-loathing attitude toward the remnants of the culture that produced them. Perhaps the underlying center is strong enough to reassert itself--some recent electoral trends indicate that, but the divide between Libertarian conservatives and religious/social conservatives shares some characteristics of the divide between Blue and Red-Staters. It's complicated. I am not really at all optimistic (a rational analysis) but remain hopeful (a religious or ethical virtue).