US Immigration on the Easiest Setting

At least the excerpt of the article you linked say that people fear that, but does not provide any numbers to say that this fear makes sense or not.

We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).

You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).

OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.

However, what's going on in this chart?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...

I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).

However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).

> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?

In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.

Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.

> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?

> You can see this just by going around the country

I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

But the outright desire for an ethnostate or a monoculture are both politically untenable in the West. Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially that.

America is not a good candidate for that for various reasons, but I see no reason that Denmark or Japan shouldn't be able to codify their ethnic makeup and adjust immigration policy accordingly. As a Korean, it is really nice to visit Korea and feel among 'my people', even though culturally I'm an American. I've heard very similar things from my white friends who move to Utah or visit Scandinavia. It's a feeling that seems to be deeply embedded in the lizard brain, to be among your tribe, identified visually and then culturally. Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.