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Thank you for the thoughtful response. Agreed that arguing from the perspective of what you would find compelling makes sense, as it's the only way to find the real weak points.
On Point 1, your proposed solution is interesting. That idea of a negotiated peace is pragmatic. It frames the problem as a failure of mutually assured destruction and suggests restoring it. If people saw that bad behavior was being addressed universally instead of just selectively, they might actually buy into the system again. However, I think the cat is out of the bag now. The decadent 2010s seem to have ruined any chance of this working. The 90s feel like the last time there was a real effort towards a color-blind society where character matters most. Things are too tribal for that to work nowadays. There are literally advanced degrees for studying how persecuted X group is. We get worked up over unfair treatment of our own group and are convinced other groups are getting away with it / getting a better deal, generally speaking.
On point 2, it seems we’re in agreement. These ideas have moved from the comment section to the core of the debate. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel it’s harder to make progress when the ‘real’ arguments are more antagonistic than Ken Bone saying we can all get along.
On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop. Our culture of ambition creates opportunities, which attracts the world's top talent. That talent reinforces and evolves the culture, starting new companies, creating new norms, and building towards the next thing.
I’m sure it’s been talked to death here but I had a professor in college who talked about how Japan will likely never have a magnificent growth period again because their reluctance to accept immigrants, combined with their demographic cliff, means they're stuck on the sidelines (in terms of real growth at least). They have a productive culture, but they're starved of new talent.
I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America. There’s no real chance for them to work hard, integrate, and have their kids become strong citizens.
That's why I think our system is so special and powerful. We have the culture that Japan lacks the people for and we offer the opportunity that China denies to its immigrants. We have the ability to give people a chance to join our hard-working culture and succeed. When we send signals that they're no longer welcome, I feel we're choosing to break the most powerful engine for prosperity the world has ever known
I'm not sure if we're talking about the same secret sauce. The feedback loop idea makes sense to me if the process is: America gets things done -> this attracts people from other countries who want to get things done -> they get things done -> it attracts more people who want to get things done... but what I meant was America's culture being the infrastructure enabling things getting done. "The best and the brightest" don't enter into the picture here, honestly my view of the average IRL American's intellect has been rather dim (and I'm far from the only one)... and yet, when I witnessed their ability to coordinate when a problem arose, it was uncanny, almost like telepathy. Apparently de Tocqueville had a whole bit about that, so it's a phenomenon that's been observed for quite a while.
Under my model immigration might be a force multiplier, but not a feedback loop. You can point to me at all the wonderful goods being transported by trains and trucks, and indeed if they stop coming, my standard of living might decline, but my point is that they're driving over a bridge, which doesn't seem to be doing so well. Halting the traffic to do maintenance might not be pleasant, but far less so than exploiting the bridge to the point of collapse.
If you want to show that your feedback model is more accurate than my base infrastructure model, you'd need to show how immigrants are feeding back into, and maintaining that culture of getting things done, because it's not obvious to me at all. Sure, they can integrate and assimilate, but even in the optimistic "magical dirt" model, first-generation immigrants are usually written off, and it's their children who are expected to integrate. Personally I'm not so optimistic, and I think it's a process that needs to be promoted actively, or else the native culture will become gradually diluted. On top of that, "assimilation" has become a bit of a dirty word to begin with, making it all the harder.
Doesn't that throw a bit of a wrench in your argument? Of all the countries in the world, China seems to have the best chance for potentially overtaking America,
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I don't think the "secret sauce" was ever that immigrants were universally viewed as just as good as anyone else. German immigrants, Irish and Italian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and now Mexican immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion and some resentment by large segments of the American society they were immigrating to. They came anyway because the opportunity afforded by the runaway growth of the American economy was irresistible to those with incredible grit or just those with no other options. And as a class they worked hard to seize that opportunity and to prove that they could belong just as much as native-born citizens, despite the suspicion they faced.
If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state. If you make it to America, you are effectively guaranteed some share in its riches whether you then work hard or not. This has the two-fold effect of removing the implicit filter on immigrant quality, and of creating larger proportions of the resulting immigrant population who bear out the nativists' suspicions. Also add to that the effect of explicit multiculturalism which weakened the incentives for immigrants to assimilate quickly.
It all adds up to a world where the nativists are increasingly justified in their complaints. If the dynamic driving modern immigration does not change, two out comes are possible. The nativists will eventually be strengthened to the point that they will kill the golden goose, using the power of the state to throw the baby out with the bathwater by cutting off opportunity for immigrants across the board. Or the center will not hold and American society will dissolve into disconnected groups of takers squabbling over their share of a rapidly shrinking pie.
I am amenable to data that shows otherwise, but it seems to be that in ye olde days you came to America assimilated and depending on who and where you were you might be prevented from doing so by disgruntled locals.
Today the (hispanic at least) immigrants make no effort and seem to have no interest in assimilation. Even outside of Texas and California you see signs in Spanish everywhere, official governmental communication in Spanish and so on.
This is a huge difference in character of immigration with respect to previous waves of it.
There were massive German-speaking enclaves in the USA until the world wars. You can still find enclaves where the older folk prefer Italian.
While I'm sure you had some exceptions I doubt you had the current situation where many states had problems with a flood of zero English effort population and the government was both forced to and decided it was fine to essentially instantiate a second official language.
And for instance the Pennsylvania Dutch are small, isolated, insular, and German - and still are. Very different from getting on public transit in NYC and getting surrounded by Spanish speakers.
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