Early on all the students had been born in Sweden but by 1890 the second generation of American-born students predominated.
None of this is to suggest that the American-born students had it easy.
He told potential donors that many of the American-born students at Brown had never even been to church, to say nothing of the students from Asia or the Middle East.
The program also includes a handful of American-born students who have above-average scores on state tests and a yearning for a multicultural environment.
At prestigious Augustana College, for example, American-born students began to predominate after 1890.
The classes in Chicano-Latino studies do not seem to have stopped fights between American-born Hispanic students and recent immigrants from Latin America; one erupts on camera.
An immigrant father, age 41, and an American-born student of 23, they bent together over a list of "polite expressions" for a janitor to use with his boss.
Some American-born black students acknowledged that they were not on good terms with their Haitian peers, and they put the blame at least in part on the Haitians, describing them as standoffish.
Supporters of mainstreaming argue that this is to be expected, given the longer time that American-born students have been learning in English.
The scrutiny of students of Arab descent has so far touched off little protest, a stark contrast to the outrage when American-born students have been profiled by university or law enforcement officials.