The Pot That Refuses to Melt

Over the past several years, a growing number of writers - many working outside traditional institutions - have undertaken the difficult work of challenging and dismantling the dominant dogmas surrounding immigration. Much of that work has been scattered across essays, blog posts, and independent research.

... Modern political rhetoric often assumes that move a group across borders, change its institutions, disrupt its environment, and its social profile will quickly reconfigure. But history suggests otherwise. Group differences are stubbornly durable. Status, skills, norms, and behavioral patterns do not dissolve on contact with new soil. They persist...

The standard story of European assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home... This return migration was negatively selected - the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave... America did not lift entire populations into the middle class, but instead retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest...

This selection process matters because it radically alters how we interpret observed convergence...

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: nativists at the time were correct. They were correct about the political effects that these new arrivals would have. The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigration wave entered a country with virtually no welfare state and, by historical standards, consisted of cognitively typical Europeans. But the descendants of this wave powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political equilibrium leftward.

Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable institutional expression of a transformed electorate, and the results are responsible for America’s fiscal woes. Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely...

The result was a durable "Europeanization" of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics... there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910 and 1930 and support for state welfare spending...

Group differences persist strongly, regardless of who is favored, throughout the world. Racial disparities follow similar patterns in South America...

Hard assimilation is not real; immigrants and their descendants remain distinct from prior populations and never become statistically indistinguishable... Soft assimilation - when formerly different groups cease to experience each other as fundamentally alien - can happen. In the American case, European ethnics did eventually soft assimilate, which is why they are so often brought up by immigration advocates as successful models...

The United States did not preserve its original ethnocultural composition; it underwent ethnogenesis...

In post-Civil Rights America, being non-American is valuable. It gets you privileges (affirmative action), access to ethnic network... Instead of potential edge-cases trying to pass themselves off as American, you get a "flight from white," ;

Survey research shows that white Americans, across political lines, are more likely to regard being “American” as central to who they are than being "white." This is not true for nonwhites...

But the evidence points in a darker direction. Human populations are not blank slates, and the traits that shape economic, cultural, and political life are not easily erased by borders or bureaucracies. They persist across generations. They reshape the societies that receive them. And once demographic changes occur at a large enough scale, attempting to rectify and reverse it through policy becomes an uphill battle. This is the part of the immigration debate that polite conversation avoids: immigration is not just an economic policy. It is an entire nation-building (or nation-ending) policy...

Societies are not melting pots. Rather, they are closer to ecosystems. Introduce new elements in small numbers and they may eventually adapt to the environment. Introduce them in large numbers and the environment eventually adapts to them...