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There are a lot of variables that determine how people will respond to mass migration, including the number of migrants, the speed with which they arrive, the cultural distance between them and the native population, and how innately tolerant that native population is. You probably couldn't move 10 people across a mountain valley in New Guinea without triggering some sort of tribal war, while as we all know Anglos and their Germanic cousins are capable of passively accepting millions of alien newcomers every year without murdering them. This difference is partially genetic, but also in large part due to the development of social technologies that allow for cooperation across groups larger than Dunbar's number, of which organized religion, nationalism, and confucianism (if you consider it distinct from the other two) have been the most successful.
Now overall I'm pretty happy with the fact that most of us nowadays don't kill strangers on sight and think a continued expansion of our circle of care would be a good thing, but advancements in communication and transportation are threatening to overwhelm the capacities of our existing social technologies, and until they either adapt to the times or new ones are born from the ashes of our society, we are in a dangerous and volatile transition period (see all the comparisons between our present moment and European history between Martin Luther and Westphalia). This sense of an impending storm contributes to the growing wave of isolationist and nativist sentiment around the world but, conditional on continued economic growth and us all not getting turned into paperclips, it is in the longer view merely a tactical retreat, as competition between groups ultimately favors those able to marshall a larger population and greater resources.
Bringing things back down to Earth, I've been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and belonging as a result of the recent immigration kerfuffle. Growing up as a mixed-race State Department kid, I never really had a hometown, a nation (in the blood and soil sense), a church, or many of the other things that root people in time and space (though it turns out a few formative years in sub-Saharan Africa is a pretty good inoculation against many stupid ideologies). To the extent that I have a people to call my own, it is the coastal American PMC class with its mixture of whites and "elite" immigrants. I don't know whether the Indians (and others) I went to school with and whose weddings I attended represent the top 1%, 0.5%, 0.1%, or whatever of their cousins in the mother country, or what visas their parents came here on, but they are good people and at the end of the day no man should betray his friends.
I have looked for the old American nation that this class replaced and found only ghosts and the dusty pages of Tocqueville and Fischer. Once upon a time my grandfather was a school principal and a Mason who read Latin and coached wrestling in a small town with a general store and a train station and town hall meetings out of a Rockwell painting. There was one black family in town, courtesy of the Great Migration, but apart from that there was hardly even an Ellis Islander in sight (I'm told the previous generation had not been fond of Catholics or Jews). Now, half the buildings are empty and the meetings are about how to beg the federal government for grant money to fix the rusty pipes, or when they will have to finally close down the school because the only children born in the county are Amish. Whomever you blame for this state of affairs, the culture that built that place is dead and no amount of nationalistic necromancy will conjure up anything functional out of its corpse.
So your diagnosis as a rootless cosmopolitan is that the nation is dead?
There is a path forward for an American nation of some sort, but its relationship to the one that many here want to restore will be akin to that between 10th century Constantinople and 1st century Rome: if you squint there is continuity but it is obscured by changes in faith, language, ethnicity, and forms of government. The question of whether the future Spanish-speaking Catholic integralist American Empire (just to throw out one possibility) is truly American is one I will leave to the historians.
Since you never had a connection to the country in the first place, don't you think it's plausible that the quality that exalts a nation is invisible to you? I figured that was the source of the disdain inherent in the unironic use of the rootless cosmopolitan label.
Like is there a technologically evolving nation that hasn't changed with each generation? Why would anyone expect a millennium long continuity? There are still readily identifiable qualities that mark someone as American - Americans are loud, arrogant, bombastic, exhibitionist, individualistic, atomised, beautiful, image-obsessed, obese, too skinny, egalitarian, greedy, opinionated, angry and stupid, aggressive and dominating, etc. Unless that changes dramatically there is still a through line imo, but I don't know how to explain the actual meme, I think it's one of those things you get through cultural osmosis or you don't.
I have no problems spotting what in old travel guides would be called national characteristics and feel very keenly the points at which my parents' cultures grind against each other to produce sparks (in a way that they themselves never seem to fully grasp). I don't however hold that these characteristics are inherently bound to any given ethnos and that this should be the primary criterion by which political boundaries are drawn.
Regarding cultural change over time, the question, as Bryan Caplan puts it, is what makes cultural change through immigration worse than cultural change through time, if the end result is equally unrecognizable? The honest answer is usually "I want my descendants to look like me" or to put it autistically "I have a biological imperative to maximize the propagation of my genes." To be fair, my descendants looking like me was never really an option to begin with, so perhaps the value of this is lost on me; from where I stand having descendants at all seems sufficient.
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