A good example of the Motte and Bailey technique: the only way this statement is even approximately true is if "actually built" is interpreted narrowly to mean unskilled physical labor in the sun, but the writer hopes the reader will unconsciously become sympathetic to a broad interpretation of "actually built" to mean something like "wealth creation" even though most wealth creation over the last 200 years was the result of inventing things, explaining those inventions to others and organizing labor (through professional corporate managers, finance and government policy) which of course in the US was done mostly by white protestants.

They built the legal, political, and cultural structure that enabled America to flourish.

Wonder why Africans didn’t build many Washingtons back in their home countries..

P.S: I’m African (Nigerian)

FFS, that's asinine and obviously incorrect. The counter-examples are obvious: look at all the areas in America where (especially historically) the population is pretty much 100% "white European protestants." Would you expect to find everyone there living outside, exposed to the elements, with no cities or towns anywhere?

How did you come to believe what you wrote? You should check your learning pipeline for bugs.

Gonna strongly disagree with you there. Look, many people don't like it, but the truth is that many of those myths you just proffered are only half true. Many Chinese participated in building railroads, but so did many, many white protestants. And guess who designed the rail roads and surveyed the routes. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire system was kicked off through the labor of blacks who built the rail system in the east long before many of either the Chinese or the poor white protestants even got here. And did most of the dirty work to extend it west so that the Chinese you're talking about could connect it.

Canals, again, were definitely designed and organized by white protestants. And, also again, blacks did the majority of the early work there too. Why? Because everyone else, from the native americans we tried, to the Irish, tended to die from malarial disease doing that work. Horrible as it sounds to say, it's more accurate to say that many Irish, um, "made sure blacks were working hard to build the canals". But to write white protestants out of that story? When they literally conceived and designed the whole thing? Nonsense.

And on and on. I mean really? Italians built New York? Where do you think the harbor came from that the Italian immigrants sailed into? The infrastructure fairy? Where do you think the engineers who conceived those bridges, harbors, ports, Ellis Island, etc etc came from? Out of the butt of a rainbow colored skittles pooping unicorn? It was white protestants. (I'll make you even madder, most of them were male.) Oh, by the way, guess who the protestants had doing the work in the caissons? It wasn't Italians. Slavery was horrible. Especially for blacks. But it got $#!t done.

You can believe your origin myths if you like, but please, don't try to make your space in America by attempting to write other people out of theirs.

I hate how you get racial with your comment, but since you want to go there: literally 90% or more of America from the 1700s through the 1900s was physically built by on the backs of Protestant white labor.

Your view seems to be narrowed to a few isolated railroads or tunnels built by the Chinese or Irish near the coasts. You’re forgetting the development of the entire vast interior of the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of miles of roads carved and built from nothing. Fields cleared and plowed. Irrigation and drainage ditches. Towns and cities along with their infrastructure built up out of the dirt, essentially none of it done with slaves or indentured labor.

The Midwest really gets screwed in this retconning of US history. They didn’t have slavery like the south; they didn’t have banks that profited from the slave capital like the northeast. Half of them came over as indentured servants themselves, and then tons of them died fighting in a war that didn’t have anything to do with them because they were morally outraged by slavery. Now they’re lumped in with all the other “white people.”

Arguably, the bulk of the "raw resources" which have accumulated to US business interests came from eg Latin America, from which Europe and later America pulled rubber, silver, beef, copper, chocolate and a thousand others. Neither have we stopped; where do you think Nestlé's palm kernel oil comes from? Not the raw resources within our borders.

I recommend everyone read "No Wall They Can Build" and "Open Veins of Latin America".

For example, my parents come from Bangladesh, which was disarmed by the British. They cannot understand—for deeply cultural reasons—why anyone would need a gun. My wife’s parents, meanwhile, come from a frontier tradition, where you need guns to protect yourself from mountain lions or in places far from the reach of the law. Insofar as everyone votes their culture, why shouldn’t the people who are already here be able to say “we don’t have anything against your culture, but we prefer ours, and we don’t want you coming her and changing our society?”

Citation needed. Especially for the "generations". From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down.

My personal thesis is that some countries are really good at absorbing and integrating immigrants, and they see the benefits. America is exceptional at it, possibly the best in the world.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01651... ("Under this model, immigrants do not fully assimilate; rather, they transmit certain old-country values and behaviors to their descendants in the new country. Empirical support for culture transplant varies depending on the particular trait in question. Social trust, for example, shows strong evidence of transplant over different time periods and in many different countries.... the results suggest that a 'transplant' does occur in the U.S., as a strong relationship exists between individual savings and ancestral savings rates. The relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In a midrange estimate, a 1 percentage-point increase in ancestral-country savings rates is associated with a 1 percent increase in retirement savings among second-generation immigrants.")

> From your own example, you seem pretty well-integrated into mainstream American culture only one generation down.

Only superficially, despite coming from a very westernized family in a former british colony. There's an enormous gap in "deep culture" between me and my wife's family and my wife and her family (who came here before the American revolution from Britain). You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids, interact with their families, view the world, etc.

You were generalizing about a range of cultural behaviors, and for several generations.

> You think you're well-assimilated until your kid wants to "express themselves" and you realize you abhor how Americans raise their kids

There is no single "American method" for raising kids, even among populations that have lived here for many generations. Compare rural Utah to the Bay Area or to suburban Dallas and you'll likely find stark differences.

The article discusses other traits that are passed on, such as social trust (which is specifically discussed in what I quoted). Here’s a book on it: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594

Is the US actually better at absorbing immigrants than Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand? I’m unconvinced.

It turns out, everyones kids assimilate into american culture just fine. Today you can’t tell whether a kid came from an anglo or irish or italian background. In some parts of the US that is already true for latinos, who are now the dominant population in many american cities, and whose youth population engaged with the same things as any other american youth population today.

But they did change it, into something completely different. America was supposed to be like what you might still see in some small New England towns, with decentralized power and an actively engaged, self-governing citizenry. If you were someone in 1920 who thought WASP culture was a good thing, your fears were completely validated. That country doesn't exist anymore.

I'd only reiterate that if the question is whether there can be high-trust societies with a lot of local self-governance, that also have a lot of immigration, then Massachusetts proves that the answer is yes.

Yes, this is indeed the precise excuse given for every single wave of immigration in US history for hundreds of years. Yet somehow we're still here, leading the world economically, politically, and culturally, watching as the frightened closed societies of Europe and Asia circle their wagons and fade into oblivion.

You've said that your wife's family has been in this country since before the American Revolution. So your kids aren't exclusively products of your (recent-immigrant) family's culture.

> In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country.

That's how evolution works: Through the combined effects of variation — especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction — plus selection for that which provides an advantage in the relevant environment. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.)

> There are perfectly good reasons why the people in new country wouldn’t want to live with those changes.

Different people dislike a wide variety of changes. (We love novelty, we hate change.) Robert A. Heinlein said, "Never argue with the weather"; in the modern world, population migration falls into that category.

Footnote: I'm re-reading David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest, about the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War — which was a subject of not a little personal interest to me and my generation back then. It's saddening to read again how U.S. policymakers' insistence on unrealistic premises — rejecting knowledgeable advice from experienced Asia hands — led to delusions that we could interfere in a colonial war on the cheap. Modern global migration presents similar opportunities for policy f*k-ups.

The super-majority of every group still marries within their group, so our case is unusual. (My wife still has 7/8 British ancestry.) Our kids are a negotiated mix: Bangladeshi dad morality and career expectations, Oregonian mom austerity and disciplinary techniques. Regardless, my point is that they’re far from Oregonian. Folks in Eugene, OR probably wouldn’t want my daughter running the town.

> In a democracy, those cultural differences will be reflected in the government and society of the new country. That's how evolution works — variation, plus selection for that which works, especially through mixing of genetic- and cultural traits via sexual reproduction. (It's part of the Great Project of building a universe.)

I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy. Or maybe “worse is better.” Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in. And they should realize that who they invite to join that society has a big effect on that.

That certainly might be the case for the first couple of generations. But it's a movie, not a snapshot. My own kids have ancestry from six different countries (that we know of), including emigration from two countries within just the last 100 years or so and from two other countries in the 50 years before that. The neighbor kid (who's now verging on middle age) is ethnically the product of a very-mixed marriage, and he himself married a girl from yet another immigrant group — they just had a baby whose ancestry is, I think, from six different countries as well.

> I would characterize what’s happening to America as more like entropy.

Entropy presupposes no external input of energy or information, doesn't it? Immigration can provide both.

> Regardless, I view society as democratic project, not a free market or evolutionary one. People get to design the kind of society they want to live in.

To a very-limited extent that's true. But quaere whether an even better metaphor would be a rugby scrum: Even within a hypothetical ethnic monoculture, "people" aren't a monolith (as in the famous Apple "1984" commercial); they don't have the same tastes, drives, or capabilities, and they do tend to push to get what they want, both alone and with others who are of like mind — or who are coerced to help, or at least to acquiesce.

Each of us certainly has our cultural preferences. Your own preference — in essence, your value-weighting of the various factors in play – is by no means irrational. But we can question whether you've realistically assessed the likely cost and effort required to restrict global migration in today's world. (That's why in a previous comment I cited Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest about the well-intentioned but, ultimately, catastrophically-naïve policy decisions that got the U.S. into Vietnam in the 1960s.)

If King Canute were alive today, he'd likely smile knowingly at our conundrum; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide. "The episode is frequently alluded to in contexts where the futility of 'trying to stop the tide' of an inexorable event is pointed out, but usually misrepresenting Canute as believing he had supernatural powers, when Huntingdon's story in fact relates the opposite."