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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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I would like to spotlight this comment by @urquan in last week's thread because it touches upon something that I feel warrants it's own discussion seperate from all of the drama surrounding the death of Renee Good. Specifically this line here...

My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs.

Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture". I used to find this deeply frustrating, and even as a teenager it seemed obvious to me that there were clear cultural distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast, North and South, never mind between the US and UK or the US and France. We have an entire host of uniquely American, myths, stories, heroes, sports, holidays, figures of speech, etc... How could anyone be so blind as to think that the United States has no culture? It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.

In the blue corner we have liberals and post-modernists who seem to view the idea of nationalism and a national identity as something distinct from one's political, racial, and sexual identity as either "fake and gay" or something to be deconstructed and dismantled. To the extent that the existence of a distinct American national identity is acknowledged, it is as something to feel embarrassed about and apologize for.

...and in the red corner we have this guy. Yes I am aware the commercial itself is for an electric car, but let's be real, its a Cadillac, and I think we all know who that character would have voted for in 2024.

This ties into the rest of @urquan's post and what I see as the core appeal of Trump. I think that a large part of the reason that Trump evinces such strong reactions, both positive and negative, is that he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.

I have been accused of "trolling" and "rage-baiting" by users here for quoting Teddy Roosevelt's "Hyphenated-American" speech, but its something I stand by, and that I feel bears repeating.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.
This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.
The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

  • Theodore Roosevelt Addressing the Knights of Columbus, October 12th, 1915

It is that sense of one's real heart-allegiance that I feel is sorely missing from much of the modern immigration debate.

I largely agree with your points, and think integration is important. But also, living in the Twin Cities and watching how ICE is harassing a lot of our Hmong neighbors (my wife’s native-born coworker’s native-born children were detained) underscores just how stupid and racist the kind of Trump supporters that would seek to move through the get-50-days-of-training-and-join-ICE-on-street-rips-in-Minnesota are.

The Hmong fought with us in Vietnam and there was some danger posed to them after our withdrawal. Many got refugee status, but did so decades ago. A bunch settled here in Minnesota. A few are still anamist, but most have converted to Christianity. They like hunting and fishing. The growth of the local Hmong middle class has resulted in more Minnesotans, unhyphenated, owning bass boats. We’re on the third and fourth generations born here in the States. The previous generation owned pho and bahn mi restaurants. The current attend the U of M and have middle class corporate jobs.

There is no significant ongoing illegal immigration issue related to our Hmong community. But the ICE agents being bussed in to our metro from red tribe America genuinely have zero conception of any of this. If they’re at all representative of MAGA, I promise you they also believe in hyphenated Americans.

So, your coworker. She was born in the US, right? But not her parents. So counting her, and her parents, she's 1/3 people born here? And then adding her grandparents she's 1/7? And great-grandparents she's 1/15? Presumably she is not included in the "ourselves and our posterity" that opens our constitution, since all of her ancestors were on the other side of the world, speaking foreign languages in a godless jungle at the time. In what world is that person, in any way, an American? That's a man born in a barn, not a horse.

What about her children? Did she intermarry with an American, or did she marry another foreigner in order to have foreign children? As if I even have to ask. Those kids, assuming they're 3/3 through parents, they're still 3/7 in grandparents and 3/15 with great-grandparents?

I don't care how polite and law-abiding they are. I've got my own model Asian minorities (they're always Asian, almost like biology dictates impulse control) in my neighborhoods. They're still foreign, they still change the character of the nation, and they should still only be allowed in small number and not allowed to form ethnic enclaves. They certainly should not be used as a shield for the abominable minorities (africans, muslims, and african muslims, I can't believe we let them in, my grandchildren will be cleaning up this mess), or as some example to be followed rather than an aberration that worked out.

There is no significant ongoing illegal immigration

Fifteen years ago the argument was legal vs illegal immigration. Now it's American vs Foreigner, and the paper citizenship of the foreigners don't carry any weight. I do not care where these people were born. They are not American, they are not native, and they do not belong here. If they are gracious guests, they may be allowed to stay, but they are guests and may be removed.

In what world is that person, in any way, an American?

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

You can’t help but equivocate between counting ancestors and “character of the nation” bullshit. I think you’re just parroting any excuse you can find. There is no coherent threshold that keeps the people you like in America while driving out the nasty foreigners.

Maybe you’re far enough up your own ass to have your own Ariernachweis going back to 1788. Which of the 28,000 voters was your meal ticket? Who secured the blessing of liberty for you?

American culture is awesome. I don’t think you deserve it.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

Sure you do. The US does it all the time. So does the enemy. "The Constitution" is a piece of paper, the only people defending it are those whose social capital and influence stems from it as a flimsy pretext.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest.

Why not? Everyone else does, and whatever objections you and I might muster have clearly failed.

To be clear, I do not endorse the assessment described above. I do not believe that "American" is a boundary that can be effectively drawn on racial or ethnic lines. Unfortunately, that agreement is downstream from my assessment that "American" is not a boundary that can be effectively drawn at all.

American culture is awesome

Care to take a stab at defining it?

I kind of took half-hearted stab at it in my reply to @Skibboleth but lets go deeper.

Things that are particular to the culture of the United States:

Football, Baseball, Basketball, Apple Pie, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Hot Wings, Cowboys, Cadillacs, pick-up trucks, SUVs, the Stars and Stripes, John Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Lee, the Apollo Program, the Panama Canal, public displays of Christianity, being prudish about sex, being libertine about guns and drugs, eating Turkey on the 4th Friday of every November, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence (not necessarily in that order)

Slightly more seriously, our core mythos is that of "the grand frontier." We are the children of explorers and pioneers who crossed oceans and deserts at great risk to escape the old world and find the land of opportunity. This mythos feeds something of an independent streak compared to a lot of other cultures. Ask three Americans a question and you'll get five different answers. We think we know better and are not shy about saying it. We also tend to prioritize being "friendly" over being "polite" which is the opposite of what you see in much of Europe and Asia.

https://www.zompist.com/amercult.html

Of course America has a culture. Both red and blue tribe Americans basically fit in the picture above, maybe one or two exceptions on each side.

Sure. I wasn’t fully satisfied with my ramblings during the user viewpoint post, anyway.

Tl;dr The American ethos is classical-liberal individualism by way of the marketplace of ideas. Everyone has certain rights, and if you play along with America’s rules, we’ll enforce them for you. And you should want to play along.

  1. Enumerate a clear set of individual rights.
  2. Credibly guarantee these rights to as many people as you practically can.
  3. Use collective action (military, welfare…) mainly to enforce those guarantees.
  4. Thrash competing cultures in the marketplace of ideas. Absorb anything that puts up a good fight.
  5. Maintain confidence in the superiority of the preceding points, no matter what you absorb.

Points 1-2 incentivize cooperation over defection. Point 3 hedges against some of the worst outcomes for subcultures, again incentivizing cooperation. Point 4 is just business, and Point 5 keeps the whole thing running.

Adopting point 2 is probably the hardest part, and it’s one that plenty of other states have fumbled. We really had to believe that there were other people deserving of those rights. Even then, we almost lost it all due to the economic incentives of denying those rights to some people.

I’m willing to believe that our start was only possible due to the combination of British law, Protestant religion, and our particular economic situation. But once the engine was going, we were able to stabilize and adapt when other cultures were collapsing. We handled the development of nationalism better than basically all of Europe. We won the Cold War right as we reassured ourselves of point 5. Our culture works, and I expect it will continue to work.

I like this answer. Thank you.

My concern is that we've had too many people chewing away at numbers 1 and 5 for decades, and that the confidence is really hard to regain. In trying to account for the past failure of Point 2, we ate away at Point 1 as well.

I'm not him, and culture is of course very slippery to define. But I'd like to try. (I'm also American, but I've lived abroad enough to see clear differences)

Language: Most of us speak English, but with a sizable minority who speak Spanish. There are isolated areas where people speak other languages, but there's usually strong pressure for the kids there to learn English, and most of us never make much effort to learn a second language other than English.

Geography: the US is a very large country, with people spread out all over it, and our cities are also fairly low density. This leads to a lot of detached single-family homes, car ownership, and driving. I'd say it also contributes to a culture that's fairly closed off, with most people only sharing their real feelings and thoughts with the people physically in their home.

Religion: Used to be overwhelmingly Christian, but that's changing rapidly. Still lots of cultural traditions inherited from Christianity though, like the Christmas holiday season and most businesses closed on Sundays. Most people are fairly accepting of others' religious beliefs, as long as it doesn't require us to actually do anything.

Fashion: Very casual. Most people wear something like jeans and t-shirts, or sportswear, almost everywhere. Exception: politicians, lawyers, and fancy offices still wear the traditional suit-and-tie. It's rare for people to dress in formalwear or any sort of traditional ethnic clothes. People also speak in a casual manner to almost everyone.

Food: Large portions of meat, cheese, salt, and sugar, with fairly simple presentations. Lots of soda and coffee, moderate alcohol. Smoking is increasingly rare. Not a lot of vegetables, and they're most often served raw in a side salad. Tap water is safe to drink, although many people buy a filter or bottled water anyway. Most people have a kitchen with a large oven that can bake pretty large sizes, so it's easy to prepare, say, an entire turkey at Thanksgiving. Not common to eat routinely eat street food or at communial dining places. Drive through fast food very common though. Obesity is quite common.

Politics: People tend to be pretty blunt and outspoken, and are happy to tell you their thoughts on whatever is in the news lately without much filter. They have a strong sense of "law and order", and are shocked when people don't follow the law. But also a lot of cynicism about governmeng in general, especially Congress, so they don't expect to be able to have much personal interaction with government. Liberals often like to do public protests, but this is mostly performative, not a serious attempt to topple the government.

Economy: Highly capitalistic culture. People trust the currency, and don't worry too much about things like counterfeiting or fraud in their normal life. "High inflation" means like 5%. There's a lot of talk about things like side hustles, startups, and the stock market. Almost everything is bought through market transactions. It's considered quite unusual for someone to go hitchhiking, couchsurfing, home farming, homemade clothes, etc- much easier to just get a job and then pay for all that stuff with money. People expect that infrastucture like water, power, sewage, etc will generally work but occasionally have issues.

Recreation: Traditionally centered around watching TV at home, now more often digital. Children do a lot of sports and hobby clubs, but those are increasingly rare for adults. Lots of time spent watching and talking about the "big 3" sports of American football, basketball, and baseball, plus smaller amounts for other sports, but not many people do them in real life. Media shows a lot of violence, some swearing, but sexuality makes people uncomfortable. Lots of self-deprecating humor about the faults of America.

What do you think of this list? Obviously a lot of generalities and exceptions here, but I think it works pretty well overall.

Ha. We went in completely different directions with our answers, but yeah, I’d endorse this one.

People tend to be pretty blunt and outspoken, and are happy to tell you their thoughts on whatever is in the news lately without much filter.

Was about to get a little chuffy on this one, being in the South and the "bless your heart" cliche coming to mind, before I caught it was under politics. And that point I was thinking of is under your 'Geography,' good catch on the closed-off-ness.

Yeah, I think this is a great broad-strokes; really, a lot more detail than I expected anyone to reply with! Thank you kindly.

Isn't "bless your heart" kind of an open insult in the South? I was thinking more of, like, the east Asian "face saving" culture" where, even if you say something stupid, other people will let it slide because they don't want to cause embarassment. And also, dictatorships where saying the wrong thing might cause you to get executed by the government.

It is now, but for a long time it was taken as (relatively) sincere.

I think this is a pretty good effort at defining "American culture", and do not believe that I could do better.

Suppose you are confronted by an angry and possibly violent mob of Americans. Which of these features you have listed would you appeal to in attempting to talk them down and convincing them to disperse? That is to say, which of these features provide serious, reliable traction on an interpersonal level?

Talking down angry mobs is something notable leaders have needed to do many times throughout history, and generally "culture" is what has allowed them to do it. Do you believe you are describing that sort of culture above?

I don’t believe any nation could quell revolt by appealing to food and fashion. Not without some clever metaphors!

You’re looking for something more civic-minded. Something like Washington’s Newburgh address. What an absolute legend.

Thing is, that’s not a speech to a mob. Rioters aren’t usually good listeners. Do you have any examples in mind?

The specific speech that brought the question to mind was Alexander's purported speech to his mutinous army at Opis. A neat parallel to your own choice, it seems.

I feel both these examples are quite distant, and that I have seen and heard many examples of leaders or prominent men being noted for addressing hostile audiences in circumstances of significant danger, and nonetheless persuading the audience by their appeal. Unfortunately, I can't recall them; as with our two examples here, it would be interesting to see what elements of shared culture people appeal to under duress, and assess whether those elements are meaningfully shared under current conditions.

Most of the time we just do nothing. Let them rant, they'll eventually get tired and go home. Trying to "talk them down" usualy just makes them madder, and if they're angry enough to do violence then it's kinda too late for talking. If it's a big mob then the police will show up, and maybe start arresting people if it really gets out of hand. But I think we've seen this week how that can easily go wrong.

bullshit

up your own ass

I don't think you deserve it

Aren't you a mod?

Leave the backseat moderation to heritage mottizens.

Amusingly, @LykovFamilyBand joined the Motte the same month you did. (S)he just has 4 comments to your 4700.

I'm not sure it really fit, but I couldn't resist the joke.

Of course. I was just amused by the massive discrepancy in posting - I originally assumed it was a new account.

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I mean, can you even be considered true aristocracy if you weren't around in the /r/SlateStarCodex culture war thread days?

Depends on the family. Does his wife's father have any AAQCs? What about his paternal cousins?

Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

If there are no specific thresholds or expectations attached, then it may not be a paper guest pass, but it's certainly just a paper something. A renewable subscription? A season ticket? A no-show job?

Frankly it's incoherent for you to do all this harrumphing about how precious and sacred citizenship is, and how gauche and un-American it is to question the quality of someone else's citizenship, if you're going to then claim that it's perfectly fine and acceptable for someone to be culturally and socially alien while still retaining all the powers and privileges of American citizenship. If it's such a flimsy, ephemeral concept, no deeper than some words from a piece of paper somebody scribbled on a long time ago, why shouldn't it be subject to re-negotiation, attack, and even abnegation?

I did not make those claims. I don’t support illegal immigration, amnesty, opening the borders, any of that. Nor do I deny the expectations and responsibilities of citizenship. Immigrants should arrive and naturalize legally, then assimilate.

I rejected the claim that only “ourselves and our posterity” count as Americans, and I despise the idea that even “polite and law-abiding” “model” minorities are “an aberration which should be worked out.” It is gauche and unAmerican to cast legitimate, legal citizens as “guests”. Note that KMC did not argue that citizens who are socially alien were not Americans, but that minorities were inherently “not American, not native, and don’t belong here.”

Any serious definition of American citizenship must accommodate the 14th Amendment. Ignoring it in favor of one line from the preamble is chicanery.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass

As leftists are so fond of saying, the Constitution is not a suicide pact

Good thing letting in a few Hmong is not national suicide. The Republic will survive their presence.

The paper citizens are the problem. Reminding me they are citizens does not make them any more American, it just highlights the problem.

You have devalued US citizenship rather than transmogrifying foreigners into Americans.

You haven’t articulated at all why exactly where somebody’s grandparents grew up or what language they spoke has any connection whatsoever to how “American” that person is. In which chromosome is it recorded whether or not somebody’s great great grandfather was American?

Because thier family and bloodline built the country.

I'm not being hyperbolic, or trying to invoke some sort of higher power or ethos or shared culture, like everyone else. It's just being sensible; People whom have family in America that can trace thier linieage back decades, if not centuries, are looking at a line of people who's decisions and choices and goals have had a massive knock-on secondary effects that have effected the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of others, and so on, and they in-turn been affected by others.

The son who's great-grand father ran for mayor in a town can track down the laws and see what long-term effects they had on it's development. The daughter who's great-great-great grandmother rescued a dying man from the battlefield and hid him from Johnny Reb of the devils in blue and married him, or just nursed him back to health and he went on to kill others. The grandfather that pushed for the first major business in a town, thereby changing the lives of hundreds directly, or the grandmother that pushed for them to head out west on Route 66 to pursue for better fortune elsewhere. The northen carpet-bagger that came down to the South and is the direct reason why parts of the Atlas V rocket and Space Shuttle were built in New Orleans.

(That last one is completely true, by the by. The others are generalities.)

You are presumably sitting in the results of those actions, piled on and on and on by what I would charitably call a unique group of individuals. I doubt the Earth could handle a second America lurking in the wings. We'd probably explode. Possibly literally.

Put another way, looking at it from a business perspective, if you have a buisness with a public IPO and you then conclude 'And those with the smallest shares will have identical voting power as to those with the most', they'd look at you as if you'd lost your goddamn mind.

So that's one arguement.

'But Eyes,' you might reply. 'That's begining to look suspiciously akin to what alot of Europeans refer to Class and Nobility and Lineage and whatnot. Aren't Americans virulently allergic to that?'

And I would reply, 'Why, yes. Yes it is. So I think it would be wise to look at the circumstances and reasons for such a thought to arise and perhaps correct the reason for it.'

But perhaps you're not convinced. Understandable. As they say, you don't pin others medals on your chest.

Though I wonder, sometimes. That blood tells, more than often, that we really are the results of our forefathers than we care to admit.

So! Second arguement.

Let's look at context.

I think it's fair to say that the majority of immigrants to America, up to a certain point, were what we would call settlers. People who risked it all - quite literally - to establish a better life. People with a certain attitude and grit whom were willing to wrestle civilization out of a land that, quite charitably, wanted to kill them, populated by potentially hostile locals that also wanted to kill them and each other, if not both, depending on thier mood. That there was, if you will, a certain gate they had to pass through, be it either via travel or sheer survival or grit or luck or all of the above to become the successful American Experiment.

Nor should we ignore that alot of people - especially during the early 20th century, in the period between 1900-1920 - flooded into the country, and if they could not sucede one way or another, they actually went back. 'Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor' is just really good propaganda tacked on way after the fact, that even after a large amount of threat had been wrested from the North American continent, there was still challenges to overcome. Modern infrastructure still hadn't been built, and in some places I know of, cities that are now seperated by a mere hour or so could take days to reach, because even up to WW2 there were still portions of America that, yes, really were still wild.

Times have changed. The people coming in now are not coming in to settle. They are not coming in to travel by train or horse or car to remote places to find a quite nest to live out their lives away from everyone else. Why they are coming can be interpreted in as many ways as you like, from the charitable to the uncharitable to the actively hostile, but the idea that people coming now, today, are similar in any way to the people coming to America pre-WW2(and I'm being generous with that for a reason) is utterly ludicrous.

If you wanted me to nail down a cut-off date, if I were feeling cheeky, I'd say 1965 for the Hart Cellar Act. But, no. Realistically, I'd say January 3rd, 1959. Why?

Because that was when Alaska was incorporated as a state. The last of the great frontiers, finally civilized.

No more lands left to conquer.

Look. I'm not going to sit here and say that I agree with the idea of Heritage Americans unequivocally. Though lord knows the past ten years are so have been rather testing for some of my previously held beleifs, so who the hell knows by this point.

But I do think it's silly to completely ignore all the above. Times have changed. The world as a whole is different. We need to adapt to that. How we adapt to that is an open question, yes, but I think it's fair to say that we have a slight problem that needs to get resolved, hopefully in a peaceable manner.

Fair disclaimer: The above was written while sleep deprived, with no references, and primarily because my brain would not shut the ever-loving hell up and I finally gave up and decided to put all this to paper. Maybe now I can crawl off and get some goddamn sleep.

If the criterion is leaving a lasting historical impression, then I don’t think most early Americans qualify. If it’s merely contributing, just about everybody is going to clear the bar. Any intermediate threshold is going to filter out descendants faster than immigrants.

I’ll admit I’m thinking about my dad’s side of the family. Where does ~300 years of subsistence farming put us? Plenty of 1800s or 1900s immigrants have contributed more to American culture, not to mention the economy. The wealthiest American immigrated in 2002. Does he get precedence?

Personally, I have respect for the people in the past who risked their lives to settle. The modern-day descendants of those people deserve no special accolades. You didn't do shit except get popped out in the right place from the right hole. You're not special because of what they did.

And I can't help but notice that the Heritage Americans seem to have little to no problem with white people who have only recently migrated, or that they seem to have little interest in the contributions of people who are not white but have also been here a long time.

You say special treatment, I say the Hmong are obviously not American.

The Irish and Italians have done a remarkably poor job of integrating and this coming from someone with great grandparents born in both countries.

Why is the Boston NBA team Celtics? Because an Irishman, Curley, made the city Irish, instead of American. You'll notice the dates are contemporaneous to the Teddy remarks, and you'll notice who won that argument, and you'll notice that Boston is still more Irish than American.

And you'll look at Minneapolis. And you'll start noticing every African woman in a hijab in you neighborhoods.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll learn a lesson from the past instead of pretending none of the bad parts happened.

Personally, I have respect for the people in the past who risked their lives to settle. The modern-day descendants of those people deserve no special accolades. You didn't do shit except get popped out in the right place from the right hole. You're not special because of what they did.

This argument goes both ways. By all rights, what makes modern immigrants special, in that they should be allowed access to America? Access to America isn't some human right, after all.

And I can't help but notice that the Heritage Americans seem to have little to no problem with white people who have only recently migrated, or that they seem to have little interest in the contributions of people who are not white but have also been here a long time.

So?

That's a moral condemnation, not an argument.

More comments

You can’t help but equivocate between counting ancestors and “character of the nation” bullshit.

'Culture is downstream of genetic personality traits' is the missing element that ties these together. Not stupid stuff like eating rice vs. potatoes, but 'in-group vs out-group preference', 'openness to experience', 'sensitivity to impurity', 'tendency towards religious experiences', 'collectivism vs. contrarianism' etc.

Red and black tribe americans are the closest cultural match to each other, and are genetically very very different.

I think this cuts both ways though. Cultural preferences will drive genetic personality traits.

It's a feedback loop, which if anything makes the effect more powerful. I think absent heavy coercion you will struggle to change it for immigrant populations, but the more important point is that even if you do, you are still dumping masses of new genes into the pool. The overall character of the pool will be changed no matter what you do.

I would argue that genetics is entirely downstream of culture because cultural circumstances determine what genes get passed to the next generation.