[rayiner]

The United States of America was created by British settlers who displaced the American Indians and created a new nation built on English language, law, and culture, and out of ideas that had been floating around during the English Civil War. In the 20th century we came up with these feel-good narratives about immigrants to help assimilate the massive number of immigrants that we had taken in during the late 19th and early 20th century. But we did that at the same time as we severely restricted immigration under the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.

And even though British Americans long ago became a minority--the single largest ethnic group is Germans--there is shockingly little influence from any other group in America's core political, legal, and civic institutions. Our constitution and laws have more ideas from ancient Rome and Greece than from all contemporary foreign cultures combined. The Ivy League schools that still dominate our bureaucratic and professional class were founded by British Americans as copies of Oxford/Cambridge. Silicon Valley arose around Stanford University (Stanford being an English surname) and a U.S. military that at the time was still dominated by British Americans. Wall Street is a direct descendant of London's financial sector, though it has some influence from New York's history as a Dutch city.

That's the reason the United States is economically, politically, and culturally more similar to Australia than to Mexico, despite being on the opposite side of the planet from Australia and diverging politically 250 years ago. To the extent the U.S. is an "immigrant nation," that is only in the sense that many immigrants and their descendants happen to live here. But those immigrants are governed and organized by the (now nearly dead) hand of the Anglo-Protestants, through their law, norms, principles, and institutions.

A good bit from the late Justice Scalia on this: https://www.facebook.com/TrueTexasProject/videos/antonin-sca...

[apawloski]

It's so baffling to see you on this site consistently implying that Italians, Germans, or $WHOEVER are somehow worse Americans. Because if that were true, then you'd also have to acknowledge that you and I are worse Americans, which I don't think you believe.

And in general, your obsession with of the British is strange to me, because as you note, most Americans are not British and it's been that way for most of American history. Of course, there have been many great British Americans. But if we're weirdly keeping score, it's seems obvious that there would be a larger number of great Americans who weren't British?

[rayiner]

For immigration policy, the issue is the aggregate cultural, political, and social impact of large groups of immigrants. It has nothing to do with individuals.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, reflects the impact of mass German immigration. Little Bangladesh in Queens reflects the impact of mass immigration from my country, Bangladesh. Would I rather live in a country where the government, institutions, etc., were like Little Bangladesh, or like Cedar Rapids? That’s not even a serious question. My fear about immigration is that, over time, the country will become more like Little Bangladesh and less like Cedar Rapids.

Most Americans aren’t British, but most Americans do carry on British culture and norms to varying degrees. If American soil really was magic, and you could take 100,000 Bangladeshis and they’d become cultural New England Puritans instantly, I’d be in favor of open borders.

[wmorgan]

The military is German, not British. Eisenhower, Nimitz, Oppenheimer. Operation Paperclip. The maneuver tactics you see in Band of Brothers were copied from the Prussians — that is going back to the 1870s. Patton’s speech to the Third Army is the least British speech imaginable; if Rudyard Kipling heard it then he would have exploded. USMC has a web page basically apologizing for being so German: https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/why-the-german-example/