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Even monethnic societies are assimilating rapidly into the global homogenization of culture, that's driven more by the ubiquity of the internet than by population movements. And many of the most dysfunctional and violent societies are relatively monoethnic, while other multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious societies like Singapore and Switzerland are some of the most prosperous nations on earth. And by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country, and yet they built a much more prosperous and successful society in many ways (and are still substantially richer than their European cousins today).
You are correct, though, that for diverse societies to be successful in the long term they generally need to have a majority core population (Chinese and Germans, respectively), limitations on popular democracy and, over time, a formidable police state. For these (among other) reasons, hesitation around mass immigration to the US is justified.
Diverse but isolated.
People try to claim America as a melting pot without looking at the mechanics(Nevermind that the phrase itself referred to New York City). That's the part that always sticks at me when I look at my very local history and see the various ethnic settlements that developed.
Certainly, you have diverse ethnic settlements that look from a modern standpoint to be very close to one another... but when you stop and take a step back, consider the time period they developed and the lack of coherent infrastructure, and you realize that these self-same settlements were in the middle of fucking nowhere and would take a good number of days to reach the nearest town or transportation hub, nevermind the nearest city.
Diverse, but isolated. Now, there is no isolation; we are all in the pot together, and it's slowly starting to boil.
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Well they did get the most valuable real estate in the world. Fantastic farmland, minerals, navigable rivers and not a single strong enemy anywhere in their hemisphere. I'm fairly confident that the US was the biggest oil producer of all time, they started production way before Saudi Arabia and are number 1 producer today.
Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other. From a broad overview, they're European and from roughly the same part of Europe too. This is not really a core example of multiculturalism. By that argument Britain circa 1900 would be multicultural with Scots, English, Welsh and Irish. Yet it is not really considered diverse or multicultural.
Brazil was much more diverse than America (Portuguese, Germans, blacks and a significant number of natives) and did not fare so well. Diversity also enables race quotas which are toxic for meritocracy. They're a major part of life in Brazil, India and increasingly the US. Even the Mongol-run Yuan dynasty had race quotas since the Mongols and their allies weren't able to cut it in Chinese exams - a fact which was very frustrating to the Han majority and one of the causes of the Ming takeover.
There was a big religious divide which led to some civil wars if that counts.
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