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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.

I think that's a fair assessment. The gravity of each group pulls itself towards the other.

What people often get wrong about Italian immigration is the presumption that nothing was done about it and it all worked out in the end. That's not true at all. People were extremely upset about it and that's why we passed the National Origins Act in 1924 which all but banned further Italian immigration. We shut the border for 40 years. By 1970, the foreign born population of the US had fallen below 5% and most of the earlier groups were finally assimilated.

Even in 1965, when we opened the border again, it wasn't because people wanted more immigration. It was just assumed that is was no big deal and the overall composition of the immigrants wouldn't change much. And wow were they wrong about that.

Immigration advocates want to skip the step where we struggled for decades and move right to the part where everyone is assimilated. That's not going to happen with continuous waves of new migration.

This is if you have a good outcome. A slow painful assimilation. India has the highest genetic distance of its people. The solution they had to a lot of diversity was to create the caste system and just have the different groups legally and by custom live separately. The west seems like it might go down the path of India.