 But the claim that “Had the federal government done nothing after 1865 except vigorously protect the civil and voting rights of blacks, the legacy of slavery would have faded considerably if not wholly by now through the industry of blacks themselves”  (Fullinwider 2004: 148) suggests that only the governments’ failure to protect the civil and political rights of the freed people and their descendants caused any problem. An obvious difficulty with this view is that large economic inequalities make it difficult for the government to protect the rights of the poor. That problem aside, these authors give no argument to support their view that the freed peoples’ descendants would have recovered from the wrongful harms of slavery without the help of reparations if only government had protected their civil and political rights. Fullinwider’s confidence seems to rest on the “immigrant model”, by which is meant the path to success taken by the European immigrants who came to America after the Civil War, and with “little to offer but their physical labor”, and “by dint of hard work” eventually “blended into the larger American fabric”. The implication is that the freed people were sufficiently like these immigrants to justify the inference that had government vigorously protected their civil and voting rights then they too by would have blended into the larger American fabric (Fullinwider 2004: 148).