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Last month, Cecillia Wang, the head of the ACLU, asked the Supreme Court to preserve birthright citizenship, a pillar of the 14th Amendment. Born in Oregon to Taiwanese immigrants, Wang is herself a beneficiary of the doctrine she defended during the historic oral argument—as am I. Following the argument, interest in her background exploded.

So did the backlash. The host of the right-wing podcast The Savage Nation, for example, told his listeners that Wang is “very smart, very evil, and very devious.” He then widened his lens, claiming that families that come from “hellhole” countries like China and India do not “integrate” as European American immigrants did. Instead, he said, they have converted our “melting pot” into a “chamber pot.” The transcript of the podcast went viral. President Donald Trump reposted it in full.

The assertion that Asian Americans and other nonwhite immigrants don’t “assimilate”—a freighted term, to be sure—is both easy and hard to refute. Easy because it is demonstrably false: The English language acquisition rate among immigrants, for example, was relatively high even at the turn of the 20th century. Today it’s even higher, at 91 percent.

Hard, however,........

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