Speaking of immigration problems and non-assimilation, Stanley Kurtz has an interesting post on the problem of giving preference to family members:

I am not saying that anyone in the Duka family, outside the plotters themselves, was involved here. The point is, when you bring over a vast extended clan through chain migration, and when that extended family group maintains constant ties with an originating village, it becomes vastly more difficult to assimilate. For one thing, chain migration means a constant supply of new family members who don’t know English and are unfamiliar with Western ways. For another thing, you are least likely to give up traditional practices, notions of honor, etc., when you are surrounded by people who know you from your home village. In England, it’s gotten to the point where marriage-based chain migration has resulted in entire Pakistani villages almost literally being picked up and transferred whole to Britain. Today’s Times article paints an all to [sic] similar picture, whether cousin marriage per se was involved or not.

One of the immigration policies that we need to rethink is this one. I'd much rather have someone admitted on their own merits, than because he happens to be some other immigrant's brother-in-law.

Family migration has always been traditional. I think we need more than some vague sense of unease here. I don't buy the claim that it becomes hard to assimilate when you have a clan trickling in. My take is that it becomes easier in part because the immigrant is with their clan rather than isolated. Among other things, the immigrant loses a considerable portion of the incentive to return to the native land. And having a clan move in is a pretty high commitment.

Read the Kurtz series on parallel cousin marriage and immigration chains in the UK.

For a start we could disallow marriage as a basis for family reunification visas when it's a parallel first-cousin marriage. First-cousin marriages are illegal in many states, anyway.

Family migration has always been traditional.

Not being a conservative, that argument (such as it is) carries little weight with me. Your other arguments for it seem pretty weak.

I prefer that we open the floodgates and let anyone in. Barring that, I prefer a lottery approach. It most closely resemble the experience of native born Americans. Most of us are citizens only because we won the sperm and ova lottery and were lucky enough to be born here.

The greatest attraction of this type of immigration is that it involves less pressure to assimilate. This doesn't only apply to people from sunny climates by the way. I know second and third generation Latvian and Polish families where English is spoken as a second language...and it's being passed to third and fourth generations. Of course, there are those "masters of assimilation" the Amish who have been "chaining" family members out of Switzerland for over a hundred years. I'm just not convinced that this is the great convergence of immigration and terrorism. If we only let people in on their "merit" would we be more safe? A lot of the 9/11 fiends had solid academic credentials.