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For example, my parents come from Bangladesh, which was disarmed by the British. They cannot understand—for deeply cultural reasons—why anyone would need a gun. My wife’s parents, meanwhile, come from a frontier tradition, where you need guns to protect yourself from mountain lions or in places far from the reach of the law. Insofar as everyone votes their culture, why shouldn’t the people who are already here be able to say “we don’t have anything against your culture, but we prefer ours, and we don’t want you coming her and changing our society?”
Citation needed. Especially for the "generations". From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down.
My personal thesis is that some countries are really good at absorbing and integrating immigrants, and they see the benefits. America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651... ("Under this model, immigrants do not fully assimilate; rather, they transmit certain old-country values and behaviors to their descendants in the new country. Empirical support for culture transplant varies depending on the particular trait in question. Social trust, for example, shows strong evidence of transplant over different time periods and in many different countries.... the results suggest that a 'transplant' does occur in the U.S., as a strong relationship exists between individual savings and ancestral savings rates. The relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In a midrange estimate, a 1 percentage-point increase in ancestral-country savings rates is associated with a 1 percent increase in retirement savings among second-generation immigrants.")
> From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down.
Only superficially, despite coming from a very westernized family in a former british colony. There's an enormous gap in "deep culture" between me and my wife's family and my wife and her family (who came here before the American revolution from Britain). You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids, interact with their families, view the world, etc.
You were generalizing about a range of cultural behaviors, and for several generations.
> You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids
There is no single "American method" for raising kids, even among populations that have lived here for many generations. Compare rural Utah to the Bay Area or to suburban Dallas and you'll likely find stark differences.
The article discusses other traits that are passed on, such as social trust (which is specifically discussed in what I quoted). Here’s a book on it: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594
Is the US actually better at absorbing immigrants than Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand? I’m unconvinced.
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Econ...
It turns out, everyones kids assimilate into american culture just fine. Today you can’t tell whether a kid came from an anglo or irish or italian background. In some parts of the US that is already true for latinos, who are now the dominant population in many american cities, and whose youth population engaged with the same things as any other american youth population today.
But they did change it, into something completely different. America was supposed to be like what you might still see in some small New England towns, with decentralized power and an actively engaged, self-governing citizenry. If you were someone in 1920 who thought WASP culture was a good thing, your fears were completely validated. That country doesn't exist anymore.
I'd only reiterate that if the question is whether there can be high-trust societies with a lot of local self-governance, that also have a lot of immigration, then Massachusetts proves that the answer is yes.
Yes, this is indeed the precise excuse given for every single wave of immigration in US history for hundreds of years. Yet somehow we're still here, leading the world economically, politically, and culturally, watching as the frightened closed societies of Europe and Asia circle their wagons and fade into oblivion.
You've said that your wife's family has been in this country since before the American Revolution. So your kids aren't exclusively products of your (recent-immigrant) family's culture.
> In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country.
That's how evolution works: Through the combined effects of variation — especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction — plus selection for that which provides an advantage in the relevant environment. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.)
> There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes.
Different people dislike a wide variety of changes. (We love novelty, we hate change.) Robert A. Heinlein said, "Never argue with the weather"; in the modern world, population migration falls into that category.
Footnote: I'm re-reading David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest, about the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War — which was a subject of not a little personal interest to me and my generation back then. It's saddening to read again how U.S. policymakers' insistence on unrealistic premises — rejecting knowledgeable advice from experienced Asia hands — led to delusions that we could interfere in a colonial war on the cheap. Modern global migration presents similar opportunities for policy f*k-ups.
The super-majority of every group still marries within their group, so our case is unusual. (My wife still has 7/8 British ancestry.) Our kids are a negotiated mix: Bangladeshi dad morality and career expectations, Oregonian mom austerity and disciplinary techniques. Regardless, my point is that they’re far from Oregonian. Folks in Eugene, OR probably wouldn’t want my daughter running the town.
> In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works — variation, plus selection for that which works, especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.)
I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy. Or maybe “worse is better.” Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in. And they should realize that who they invite to join that society has a big effect on that.
That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But it's a movie, not a snapshot. My own kids have ancestry from six different countries (that we know of), including emigration from two countries within just the last 100 years or so and from two other countries in the 50 years before that. The neighbor kid (who's now verging on middle age) is ethnically the product of a very-mixed marriage, and he himself married a girl from yet another immigrant group — they just had a baby whose ancestry is, I think, from six different countries as well.
> I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy.
Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both.
> Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in.
To a very-limited extent that's true. But quaere whether an even better metaphor would be a rugby scrum: Even within a hypothetical ethnic monoculture, "people" aren't a monolith (as in the famous Apple "1984" commercial); they don't have the same tastes, drives, or capabilities, and they do tend to push to get what they want, both alone and with others who are of like mind — or who are coerced to help, or at least to acquiesce.
But in that couple of generations, they’ve already massively changed the country, e.g., with Italian immigration to the US in the 20th century. Mass immigration completely changed northern Virginia where I grew up. Maybe 100 years from now those people will mix and form a new amalgam. But the place I liked doesn’t exist anymore, and the place it is now I don’t like so much—just as a matter of cultural preference. Why isn’t that a perfectly reasonable basis for opposing immigration?
> Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both.
If the energy input is used to organize rather than disorganize, sure. But immigration is like applying heat to an ice sculpture. Taking something organized and subjecting it to random forces.
Each of us certainly has our cultural preferences. Your own preference — in essence, your value-weighting of the various factors in play – is by no means irrational. But we can question whether you've realistically assessed the likely cost and effort required to restrict global migration in today's world. (That's why in a previous comment I cited Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest about the well-intentioned but, ultimately, catastrophically-naïve policy decisions that got the U.S. into Vietnam in the 1960s.)
If King Canute were alive today, he'd likely smile knowingly at our conundrum; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide. "The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of 'trying to stop the tide' of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite."