> 1. America was built on people willing to leave everything behind for all sorts of reasons. America is great because of it.
America is great because it was founded by rule following British people with a long tradition of self governance. What’s come after that is debatable. It’s certainly made America rich, I’ll give you that.
> 2. American immigrants feel a very high amount of affinity with the US and the opportunities afford to them by the country, regardless of how much affinity they feel towards their neighbours.
Yes, but what is the “US” they feel affinity for? I think the “US” they have affinity for us a very shallow concept. It’s not like say the French or Chinese that have a thousand years of shared history they identify with. My whole family is immigrants. My parents just got back from visiting family in Canada and Australia and were complaining about how much better America is. But what is America to them? They don’t care about Appalachians, or the constitution, etc. They like that you can make a lot of money and live in much bigger houses than in Australia or Canada.
> I think the main problem is that native born Americans feel a fairly low amount affinity towards each other - and that has little to do with immigration.
I think the two things are directly correlated. The vast majority of people don’t want to leave their home countries. That means the ones that immigrate tend to be the ones that have weaker social ties. And I strongly suspect that persists for at least a couple of generations within family cultures—if only because it takes longer than that to really develop deep and broad family networks in the country. But most Americans are just a couple of generations away from those initial immigrants. (None of Donald Trump’s grandparents were born in America.)
> 3. I think having a low immigration, stagnant tech and finance sectors is probably beneficial to the median person who is already in the US and doesn't really wanna work that hard and compete with immigrants. I agree with you there. If you go to Australia the ones who are getting the highest grades, becoming doctors and lawyers, buying expensive properties are all immigrants (usually East Asian / South Asian).
I agree. So I think where we differ is on whether that’s a good thing or not. A bunch of my family is exactly that kind of immigrant to Australia. They’re doing well individually. But does that make the country better for the median Australian that’s already there?