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I don't remember southern Europe being contiguous with America, or having a large percentage of its population holding revanchist views on territory lost 150 years proir. I don't recall Italian, Spanish, Greek etc politicians speaking of dual nationality or influencing America through demographics. And I seem to recall that Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian are different languages and that said populations shared little in common. I also don't remember Cultual Marxism and grievance politics dominating American culture back then. Finally, I seem to remember America's native population still growing and thereby assimilating said immigrants.

I am a child of immigrants who sees himself first and foremost as an American. I am one heck of an exception.

If you go to Staten Island, you'll find plenty of people speaking a hundred year-old dialect of Italian because they haven't fully assimilated yet and if you go back and read the concerns from those periods, the Americans of the day were every bit as worried about being overrun by Catholics with huge families and alien cultures. And while it's currently downplayed, do not forget that Catholicism was seen as quite insidious and expansionist because one can't get married Catholic unless the spouse converts and they agree to raise the children Catholic. As late as 1960, people wondered if a Catholic could get electedd President. Go back and read the editorials and articles published a century ago about the evil papists and cartoons depicting bishops hats as alligator maws ready to swallow people up. It's largely been forgotten because those people assimilated, are now generally considered just as "white" as Northern European Americans, and Catholicism is no longer the alien bogeyman it once was.