Considering that Sowell's book covered these comparisons back in 1981, you have to wonder why it took Barone, the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, so long to notice them. I mean, I could have given you a summary of Barone's argument in 1982, when I read Ethnic America. The fascinating (but hardly complete) series of similarities between Irish Americans and African Americans was the most celebrated single aspect of Ethnic America. Sowell wrote, "[B]lacks are about where the Irish were one hundred years earlier" on the first page of his chapters on blacks. Similarly, the first page of Sowell's section on the Chinese mentions, "The Chinese have often been called 'the Jews of Asia.'" Finally, Sowell lists about five similarities between Italians and Puerto Ricans or Mexicans, although the great man seems to have found the Italian-Latino comparison far less interesting or impressive than Barone does.

Nor were these comparisons original with Sowell. Irving Kristol had made the same argument in The New York Times Magazine way back in 1966. Kristol also wrote, "Puerto Ricans today resemble nothing so much as the Sicilian immigrants of sixty years ago." (Barone, though, seems to have largely given up on Puerto Ricans turning into Italians, and is now mostly pinning his hopes on the Mexicans.)

These comparisons have become commonplaces over the years among "cultural realist" writers. While definitely interesting, I must point out that you shouldn't get too carried away by them.

For example, 19th Century Irish and 20th Century blacks did share a lot. Both were big, strong, manly, good at sports, entertainment, and politics, lousy at business, enthusiastic for corrupt Democratic mayors, and had high rates of substance abuse and crime. We don't like to talk about it today, but in the 19th Century, as Barone makes clear, when Irish immigrants showed up in your town, it was Bad News. They brought crime, alcoholism, rioting, and sometimes even cholera.

On the other hand, the Irish and the blacks differ strikingly in sexual restraint. The Irish have been the least lusty Europeans for a long time. The Kennedy men made Americans forget this central facet of the Irish Catholic character, but the evidence is definitive. A couple of decades ago, the average age of first marriages in the Republic of Ireland was 26 for women and 31 for men. This is remarkable because, although contraceptives were illegal and difficult to obtain there until 1979, illegitimacy was rare.

Second, Irish religion was intensely institutional. Irishmen didn't start churches to compete with the Roman Catholic faith; they found slots in Rome's vast hierarchy. In contrast, African American Christianity has been highly entrepreneurial. Anybody could get "the call" and start preaching and passing the hat at any time.

This is an important difference because, in Sowell's view, primarily what eventually raised Irish-American behavior to acceptable levels was the Catholic Church's pounding guilt into them. In the black entrepreneurial religious economy, though, there's not much of a market for guilt, especially over sex.

The contrast between African American carnality and Irish guilt was amusingly underlined at this year's Grammies. The nubile young ladies of Destiny's Child repeatedly thanked God for their success, while wearing what looked like extra-small sandwich bags. But when the Best Song award went to the great Irish band U2, lead singer Bono made clear he thought it a little presumptuous to thank the Almighty for, of all things, a Grammy: "I just have this feeling, or picture in my head, of God looking down on people like us at occasions like this and going, 'Oh, don't thank me for that song, there's no hook and the chorus is weak.'"

The resemblance between "Asians" (by which Barone primarily means Chinese) and Jews basically comes down to both groups tending to be above average in work ethic and IQ (although Barone can't bring himself to mention those two scarlet letters "I" and "Q"). But the differences are manifold. Jews, for instance, do much better on the verbal parts of IQ tests, while Northeast Asians do better on the visual subtests. (See the "Of Jews and Japanese" chapter in Dan Seligman's fine A Question of Intelligence.) That's why East Asians do not play a major role in those many verbal-intensive fields such as entertainment or journalism where Jews thrive. And while both groups are immensely old, there are 1,000 times more Chinese than Jews. This would suggest there must be some profound differences between them.

Indeed, Barone's Jewish-Chinese comparison has become so hackneyed that it's more fun to look for better comparisons. Barone asserts, "[T]he South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants of today seem to have no parallels from a century ago." In fact several of those groups tend to be more similar to the Jews than the Chinese, and not just in physical appearance. If you are looking for groups that might have both the mathematical and verbal smarts to rival Jews, keep an eye on the higher caste Indian Hindus and the remarkable Zoroastrian Parsis of Bombay. Another even better all-around analog to Jews exists among modern immigrants: who for centuries have been a religiously distinct caste of merchants selling to surrounding peasants, and who currently deftly use their impressive influence on Congress to aid their homeland in its struggles with its Muslim neighbors: the Armenians.

That Barone never noticed any of these better comparisons suggests—along with much else in his book—that he really didn't give much thought to his Big Idea.

Finally, by comparing Latinos to Italians, Barone allows himself to glide over the racial issues that are so distinctive a feature of Latin America. While a few all-white Latin American nations like Argentina do resemble Italy, the distinguishing feature of the Hispanic nations that send many immigrants to the U.S. is a system of white dominance over darker races that, while more subtle than America's, is at least as pervasive.

A key difference between Sowell's classic and Barone's effort is that Barone has a specific political agenda. He wants to reassure conservatives that, "We've been here before." Barone tells us,

America in the future will be multiracial and multiethnic, but it will not—or should not—be multicultural in the sense of containing ethnic communities marked off from and adversarial to the larger society, any more than today's America consists of unassimilated and adversarial communities of Irish, Italians, or Jews. [Emphasis mine.]

Obviously, though, there is a huge difference between "will not" and "should not." One's a prediction, the other a prescription. The entire book is infected with this slippery vagueness over what's actually true and what Barone merely wishes were true. For instance, Barone writes:

Mexican commentator Sergio Sarmiento argues that if Mexico can achieve the South Korea-style economic growth that seems possible over the next twenty years, it will vastly reduce its economic disparity with the United States and substantially reduce incentives to immigration…. It is possible also to imagine that in time Latinos will become interwoven into the American fabric.

Yes, the imagination certainly is a wonderful thing! But any reasonable person would need a lot more evidence and logic than Barone bothers to amass to accept this flight of fancy.