[apawloski]

Were my ancient legal texts incorporated? Were yours? If you are born here, what does it matter?

But more importantly, I said Americans. Are some Americans more American to you?

America is not a startup. It is not even a company. It’s a country who was built inherently by immigration. And it was wrong to single out the Irish and Italians, and it’s wrong to single out the ___ now.

[rayiner]

> Were my ancient legal texts incorporated? Were yours?

If you are British American, then yes. Otherwise, no.

> If you are born here, what does it matter?

Empirically, yes it does! https://www.rorotoko.com/11/20230913-jones-garett-on-book-cu... (“The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance, you can partly predict people’s savings behavior just by knowing which country their parents or grandparents came from.”).

You can look at the data and see that about 50% of the difference in levels of social trust between people in Italy and Scandinavia are reflected in the descendants of immigrants from those countries to the U.S., even after generations. You can then use your eyes to look at Minnesota versus New Jersey and see more social trust and less corruption in the former than the latter. You can even tie cultural background back to concrete social indicators! Parts of the midwest settled by Dutch settlers perform better on versus metrics than parts settled by Germans. Parts of the country settled by Puritans outperform nearly everywhere else in terms of good governance and low corruption.

> America is not a startup. It is not even a company.

Culture matters even more in a country than a startup! Startups hire high-IQ people that focus on discrete problems that are amenable to scientific analysis. Voters in democracies must confront a wide range of issues that are not amenable to scientific analysis, and consist of average people who are not capable of such analysis anyway. That means the person’s gut reactions, arising from their culture and socialization, matters even more. For example, most people simply can’t understand numbers on the scale of the federal debt, but cultures differ significantly in their attitudes towards debt and savings. It’s imperative to have a body politic that has pro-adaptive cultural attitudes.

>,It’s a country who was built inherently by immigration.

That’s like saying the country was built by people who drink water. Immigrants from where? The country that exists reflects that it was built by British settlers, with greenfield development by Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest. If the country had been built by my ancestors in Bangladesh, I assure you, it would look very different than it does today.

[apawloski]

> You can look at the data and see that about 50% of the difference in levels of social trust between people in Italy and Scandinavia [...] You can then use your eyes to look at Minnesota versus New Jersey and see more social trust and less corruption in the former than the latter. You can even tie cultural background back to concrete social indicators!

For months on here you have defended and cheer-led the most nakedly corrupt administration in our lifetimes. (Let's skip the part where we have to talk specific examples of his corruption - you know it, and I know it.) And now you are spouting ignorant anti-Italian stereotypes and acting like you care about corruption. Your inconsistency of values is utterly unpersuasive so far.

> The country that exists reflects that it was built by British settlers, with greenfield development by Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest.

That does not include me, so if I were an immigrant today you would not let me in. If you were an immigrant today, would you let yourself in?

Surely you see the hypocrisy in that, especially if you consider yourself a valuable member of society. Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to be a great American if you're not British, German, or Scandinavian. And that's been true for millions and millions of non-British/German/Scandinavians through all of American history.

[rayiner]

> For months on here you have defended and cheer-led the most nakedly corrupt administration in our lifetimes.

The fact that I think Trump is the lesser of two evils doesn't change the fact that New Jersey has higher corruption levels than Minnesota. Is it really your contention that communities settled by Italian immigrants are as well governed as those that were settled by Scandinavian immigrants?

Ironically, Trump himself reflects the third-worldization of the American body politic. Our first-past-the-post system guarantees two parties, but cultural change alters what platforms can win a majority. Immigration has killed small-government conservatism--a concept that exists almost nowhere outside the Anglosphere--but a third-world strongman populist can still win the popular vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... ("Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden+27 voting bloc in 2020 to a Trump+1 group in 2024."). Little Bangladesh swung a net 50+ points to Trump in 2024.

> That does not include me, so if I were an immigrant today you would not let me in. If you were an immigrant today, would you let yourself in?

I made an argument based on evidence, so why are you responding with personal feelings? Whether any particular immigration policy would have allowed me or you to immigrate is totally irrelevant. Immigration is about the mass movement of people, who bring their culture with them and reshape the parts of America where they move. It's stupid to talk about it in terms of individuals.

[apawloski]

I guess I just fundamentally disagree that Trump’s the lesser of two evils, if you truly care about American values and culture. How could you want our children behaving like the example he sets? Can you justify his Rob Reiner tweet (for an immediately recent example) to me in a way that persuades me it’s how Americans should behave culturally?

I would love for you to answer the question about whether you’d let us in today, but I suspect you won’t because you’d have to also admit that your stance is hypocritical.

[rayiner]

People get their culture from how their families raise them, not how the President behaves. I don’t think one guy acting corruptly makes regularly people act corruptly. My dad didn’t leave Bangladesh because the President was corrupt. He left because everyone from the president on down was socialized into a culture that breeds corruption.

So I think mass immigration is a much bigger risk. Look at the history of Chicago, and the immigration-fueled political machines that gave rise to dysfunctional and corrupt government that persists to this day. Why are American cities so dysfunctional in their governance compared to western european ones? This is not some inevitable consequence of cities. In the south it’s because southern culture is just tolerant of corruption, often tracing back to power structures that arose during the era of slavery and segregation. But in the north it’s mostly the lasting effects of mass immigration of impoverished groups with strong cultural identities. We are seeing the same problem take root in Minneapolis—which until now has been one of the few well-governed cities in the north—in real time.

As to your question about whether I should have been allowed in—I’ll humor you. My dad should have been allowed in, who is a cultural outlier among Bangladeshis. He proudly tells this story about a birthday lunch in Dhaka in the 1970s, where he and a Danish expatriate were the only ones to show up on time. The Danish guy remarked that my dad must find it difficult to get along in a country where people have such a relaxed view of time. My dad loves this story, and that’s why he self-exiled himself from his homeland.

But your argument is illogical. Immigration policy doesn’t screen individuals for fit. It’s a system of mass migration. And when you’re talking about millions of Bangladeshis, not just one, you have to take culture into account. I am acquainted with a bunch of folks from Massachusetts, who grew up among descendants of Puritan settlers. They were socialized with ideas like “food is for fuel, not enjoyment” and a visceral aversion to wealth signaling. They have such an aversion to waste they cut their donuts in half and consider it a good thing if they run out of food at a picnic. They’re exceptionally orderly and temperate people, very much unlike my extended Bangladeshi family. I think America would be much better governed if more of the population was like them rather than like me and my extended family.

[wmorgan]

Everybody grew up among, and got their culture from, lots of different kinds of people. You are right about the culture of Massachusetts, where I live. It’s a special place, but it’s a counterexample to your point. MA has one of the highest rates of foreign-born population in the country, and it has been that way for a long time. When I was growing up, there was a big influx of people from China. Today it’s India. A couple of generations ago, Italy/Ireland/Poland. “Eat to live, don’t live to eat” my mother told me, but her mom was born in Germany and her dad was Irish. Massachusetts — by the way also consistently one of the most Catholic states — shows you can have the Puritan culture without the Puritans.

[apawloski]

> I don’t think one guy acting corruptly makes regularly people act corruptly.

Calling the President of the United States “one guy” I think is a bit reductive. He has spent a decade traveling the nation, rallying, and propagandizing. Surely that has impacted American culture? And we (I think) agree that the way he talks and behaves is not what we want our children to model. To me, I’d be much more averse to them acting like that than I’d be worried about them acting like random New Jerseyans.

I also think the president and his administration corrupting the government absolutely will impact regular people’s behavior and I’m surprised to hear you claim otherwise. In the same message that you are concerned with cities being corrupt as a bad thing, you are accepting and endorsing Trump doing that at a much larger and impactful federal level. Corruption is bad and we should want less of it - I don’t see how that happens under Trump.

Just a heads up that I’ll be heading out for a while so I think we have to agree to disagree at this point. Feel free to take the last word.