The Pot That Refuses to Melt

This post is the first installment in a series on immigration, written in collaboration with Arctotherium. I am deeply grateful for his support and assistance throughout this project; it has been a genuine pleasure working with him.

This series does not emerge in a vacuum. Over the past several years, a growing number of writers—many working outside traditional institutions—have undertaken the difficult work of challenging and dismantling the dominant dogmas surrounding immigration. Much of that work has been scattered across essays, blog posts, and independent research.

What follows is an attempt to synthesize that intellectual current. Our goal is to gather, organize, and extend some of the strongest arguments developed across this broader ecosystem into a single, coherent framework. If successful, this series will serve as a durable reference point for anyone seeking a serious, evidence-based case for immigration restrictionism—both today and in the years ahead.

With that said, let’s begin.

Before we talk about assimilation, we need to confront a more basic question: how malleable are human populations to begin with? Modern political rhetoric often assumes that move a group across borders, change its institutions, disrupt its environment, and its social profile will quickly reconfigure. But history suggests otherwise. Group differences are stubbornly durable. Status, skills, norms, and behavioral patterns do not dissolve on contact with new soil. They persist. If assimilation were automatic, we would expect shocks to scramble human capital and permanently reshuffle hierarchies. They rarely do. Persistence is not an anomaly in human affairs, but the baseline.

CONTENTS

1. Hierarchy Endures
2. The Long Shadow of European Immigration
3. Modern Absimilation
   1. Hard Assimilation: Becoming the Average
   2. Soft Assimilation: The Limits of Blending
4. Conclusion

Hierarchy Endures

Intergenerational economic mobility is usually measured over short horizons—parent to child, perhaps grandparent to grandchild. On that timescale, societies look moderately fluid. But stretch the window to several generations and a different picture emerges.

Economic historian Gregory Clark tracked inter-generational mobility over many generations through surnames, especially rare ones tied to historically elite lineages. In England, he tracked names associated with Norman landholding families and with estates significant enough to be recorded in medieval legal processes. These were markers of high status in the 12th and 13th centuries. Hundreds of years later, those same surnames were still over-represented at Oxford and Cambridge (Clark, 2012; Clark & Cummins, 2013).1

Gregory Clark’s research also puts to rest certain myths and misperceptions. A popular one is the notion that social mobility was greater in Australia than in England. As Clark demonstrates, however, intergenerational persistence in occupational status was about equally strong in both countries, implying their class systems had similar levels of rigidity (Clark et al., 2020).

The same story applies in Florence. By linking modern taxpayers to the 1427 Florentine tax census, Barone & Mocetti (2021) found that families who were wealthy during the Renaissance were disproportionately wealthy in the modern era. Through the Black Death, the Medici, foreign invasions, the rise and fall of republics, none of it upended the long-run ranking. What looks like mobility in the short term may simply be slow regression toward deeply rooted means.

The obvious explanation is inheritances. This has intuitive appeal—the children of wealthier people inherit more money and hence tend to stay wealthy—but it isn’t generally true; we can tell because these hierarchies regularly persist through upheavals in which inheritances were deliberately destroyed.

The American South provides one such test. The Civil War obliterated slaveholder wealth. Human property—the core asset underpinning elite status, and nearly 50% of total Southern wealth—vanished overnight. If hierarchy were simply stored in capital, emancipation should have permanently reshuffled white Southern wealth rankings. Instead, Ager et al. (2021) show that slave-holding families rebounded within roughly two generations. Relative wealth rankings among white Southerners largely reasserted themselves by the early 20th century. Perhaps more strikingly, formerly enslaved blacks also converged rapidly with free blacks who had never been enslaved. Enslavement was an extreme deprivation, yet within a relatively short historical window, differences attributable purely to slave status vanished.

An additional example comes from the internment of some 120,000 ethnic Japanese in the United States during the Second World War. Many were forced to sell their property (at low prices, because the seller in a forced sale has little leverage). Entire communities were uprooted. The inheritance theory of transmission of social status would predict long-term damage. But, as Arellano-Bover (2019) found, this didn’t happen.

Because internment status could not be observed directly in the Census, the author constructed a predicted probability of internment based on prewar geography. Because internment was overwhelmingly determined by whether someone lived inside the West Coast exclusion zones in 1940, Arellano-Bover used administrative camp records to calculate internment rates by location. Individuals in the 1940 Census are then assigned an exposure probability based on where they lived before the war. He then links those individuals forward to the 1950 and 1960 Censuses and estimates income growth as a function of predicted exposure. The design effectively treats residence near the exclusion boundary as a quasi-natural experiment, using geography-driven variation in internment risk to identify long-run effects.

The result? No evidence of permanent economic harm. In fact, Japanese Americans who were more likely to have been interned experienced faster income growth in subsequent decades than comparable individuals who were not interned, and faster growth than Chinese Americans who experienced a similar racial environment but were not confined. There are several plausible explanations, but regardless, it is clear that the internment did not permanently damage the economic prospects of the targeted Japanese.2

Speaking of the Japanese, one can also observe the continued success of the descendants of Japanese elites. Both the Samurai, which was ended after the Meiji Restoration, and the Kazoku, which was ended by the United States in 1947 after World War II and the rewriting of the Japanese constitution, had lost their formal social status, as well as their special rights and privileges conferred by the Japanese government. Yet despite this, the descendants of both classes continue to remain strongly overrepresented in academia and high status occupations to this day (Clark & Ishii, 2013).

One can also examine the failures of communist regimes to permanently erase the influence of its elites. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party undertook one of the most comprehensive attempts in history to eliminate class hierarchy. Households were assigned formal class labels. “Landlords”, “capitalists”, and “rich peasants” were stripped of property. The CCP redistributed land and abolished private firms. During the Cultural Revolution, children from suspect class backgrounds faced educational barriers and intense stigma, up to and including beatings, murder, and cannibalism. It was a decades-long campaign of social flattening from one of the most socially powerful states in history.

Alesina et al. (2022) examined the intergenerational trajectories of these elite families. For the generation directly targeted, the leveling worked. The children of pre-revolution elites lost their economic edge. By mid-century, their incomes and occupational status had converged with, or dipped below, the national average. However, when market reforms returned and overt class discrimination receded, the grandchildren of the old elite began to pull ahead again. They attained more education. They entered higher-status occupations. Their incomes rose faster than those of the descendants of the revolutionary masses. In other words: once artificial suppression ended, stratification re-emerged. The Communist Revolution interrupted lineage advantage but could not erase it.

The Soviet Union undertook similarly extreme efforts to destroy the pre-existing elite. Under Lenin and Stalin, aristocrats, business owners, intellectuals, and so-called “enemies of the people” were arrested and sent to the Gulag system. The Soviets confiscated their property, destroyed their reputations, and worked many to death. Toews & Vézina (2025) exploited variation across nearly 500 labor camps between 1921 and 1960. Some camps contained a higher share of political prisoners drawn from educated and professional backgrounds—“enemies” selected precisely because of their elite status.

After the Gulag system was dismantled and prisoners released, many remained in or near the towns where they had been exiled. Toews & Vézina find that areas surrounding camps with higher shares of political prisoners exhibit greater economic development today, as measured by population-adjusted nighttime luminosity. In other words, regions seeded with persecuted elites are more prosperous decades later. Even exile under terror did not permanently eliminate the influence of human capital.

So far, the studies have explored the intergenerational effects of negative shocks to status. One can also explore the effects of positive shocks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, just as expropriation fails to permanently erase hierarchy, positive shocks also fail to permanently create it.

Lottery winnings provide a natural experiment. Large wealth transfers, randomly assigned, should dramatically improve the long-run trajectory of recipients’ children if capital alone drives mobility. Bleakley & Ferrie (2016) explored the effects of the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery, finding that the sons of the lottery winners performed no better in terms of wealth, income, or literacy. Similarly, Cesarini et al. (2016) show that for lottery wins in Sweden, there was no lasting effect on the children’s drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills. Another Swedish lottery study also finds no effect of winning the lottery in reducing the likelihood of criminal offending in the children (Cesarini et al., 2023). The household may enjoy temporary advantages, but they quickly fade.

At this point, skeptics can still retreat to the environment. Perhaps families recreate advantage or disadvantage through parenting styles, norms, and educational expectations. Perhaps wealth persistence is cultural rather than intrinsic. Gregory Clark directly tested that proposition in a detailed study.

The logic is simple: if wealth is transmitted primarily through environmental channels (e.g., shared households, direct mentoring, proximity, socialization), then similarity in wealth should decline sharply with social distance. Close relatives who interact frequently should resemble each other more than distant relatives who rarely meet. But if transmission is primarily genetic—meaning that traits correlated with wealth (cognitive ability, time preference, personality dimensions, etc.) are heritable—then similarity should track degree of genetic relatedness, not frequency of interaction. That distinction generates testable predictions. For example:

• You are as genetically related to your first cousin as to your great-grandparent (both share roughly 12.5% of genes).
• Under a purely genetic transmission model, your wealth correlation with your cousin should equal your wealth correlation with your great-grandparent.
• Likewise, your wealth correlation with a second cousin should match that with a great-great-great-grandparent.

Notice how counterintuitive this is under an environmental model. Most people spend time with cousins. Almost no one interacts meaningfully with great-great-great-grandparents. If environment were dominant, the correlations should diverge sharply.

Using genealogical and wealth data on roughly 402,000 English individuals spanning 1750–2010, Clark found that similarity in wealth, education, and occupational status aligns almost perfectly with the predictions of the genetic-relatedness model. The decay in correlation follows genetic distance with striking precision (Clark, 2021). The probability of such a pattern emerging if environmental transmission were playing a large independent role is extraordinarily small.

Hierarchy is not a surface phenomenon easily erased by policy. It has deep roots. Establishing this is an important prerequisite to delving into the topic of assimilation and contemporary group disparities. One must first absorb this lesson from history: human stratification has inertia. Violent leveling, institutional redesign, and generational disruption have repeatedly failed to eliminate it. Any serious discussion of contemporary disparities must begin there.

The Long Shadow of European Immigration

Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common evasions in modern immigration debates. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today, and the response is almost automatic: the Irish. Irish immigrants, we’re told, arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries poor, urban, Catholic, and heavily over-represented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, rose up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear and usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any concern to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. It also does a great deal of work for its advocates. By invoking a selectively remembered past, it turns empirical questions about assimilation into moral ones, and historical disagreement into bad faith. This version of history being invoked is far too simple to bear the weight placed on it.

As can be seen earlier, when multi-generational data is used, persistence is much stronger and much more durable than what is predicted from simple parent-child correlations. What appears to be rapid convergence is often just an artifact of looking too narrowly and too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up when confronted with the data.

The standard story of European assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home. Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was not a marginal phenomenon but a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%; in some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected—the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is therefore filtered through survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class, but instead retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.3

This selection process matters because it radically alters how we interpret observed convergence. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that among long-staying immigrants in the early twentieth century, most European groups, including the Irish, Italians, and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes. It is not difficult to make a group look like a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a uniquely strong three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use actual linked grandparent-grandson data rather than inference, it demonstrates that intergenerational persistence is stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, this cuts directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They didn’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and absorb American norms wholesale. They brought values, habits, and institutional preferences with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively for benign domains like cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta; they taught Americans to eat pasta.4 But the same logic applies to deeper traits. A growing literature shows that cultural behaviors persist across generations and shape economic outcomes (see for example, Giuliano & Tabellini, 2020; Simpser, 2020; Richwine, 2023; 2024). Fulford et al. (2018), using ancestry data for over 1,100 U.S. counties from 1850 to 2010, show that counties settled by immigrants from richer European countries remain more productive today. A 1% increase in GDP per capita of the origin country predicts roughly a 0.3% increase in county GDP per capita in the long run.

And this effect is not simply driven by differences in education between European immigrants. Fulford et al. also find that once traits like historical state capacity (the length of time in which a nation has had an independent state for), trust, and cooperation are accounted for, formal education ceases to predict group impact. Berger & Engzell (2019) find parallel results for inequality and mobility: county-level economic inequality in the U.S. mirrors their European origins.

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: nativists at the time were correct. They were correct about the political effects that these new arrivals would have. The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigration wave entered a country with virtually no welfare state and, by historical standards, consisted of cognitively typical Europeans. But the descendants of this wave powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political equilibrium leftward. Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable institutional expression of a transformed electorate, and the results are responsible for America’s fiscal woes. Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely.

The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics. As can be seen from the visual below, there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910–1930 and support for state welfare spending.

None of this was unforeseeable. Contemporary observers like Senator David Reed explicitly warned, in defense of the Immigration Act of 1924, that mass immigration from populations less accustomed to self-government would produce electorates more reliant on the state and more demanding of redistribution.

There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.

Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.

What could not be modeled precisely was timing. Political integration takes decades, and as such, these effects only became electorally decisive in the late 1920s, with milestones such as Al Smith’s 1928 nomination. Had a researcher in 1920 conducted a purely fiscal analysis of this immigration wave, of the kind often used today, they would have concluded it was beneficial. But immigration reshaped the system itself, and once immigrants and their descendants gained political power, they used it, and this was predictable in direction even if not in precise magnitude at the time.5

But persistence is not limited to just foreigners either. Internal migration reveals that even regional differences within the same country persists. Population movements change receiving societies. While the Great Migration is usually discussed among historians as it pertains to American blacks, numerically speaking, a larger number of white Southerners left the South than blacks. The movement of white Southerners measurably increased political conservatism, such as greater Republican vote shares, opposition against the Civil Rights Act, support for Reagan’s tax cuts, and opposing the certification of the 2020 election (Bazzi et al., 2023a; 2023b).6

Crime and literacy data further undermine the lazy analogy between European immigration then and Hispanic immigration now. Moehling & Piehl (2009) show that, correcting for age and providing the breakdown by country of origin, while some Europeans immigrant groups were overrepresented in crime, such as the Irish, it was largely in minor offenses like public drunkenness. Differences in serious crime were generally small. While Italians were indeed overrepresented in crime, the difference was small when compared to Mexicans, who were the clear exception.

The same paper also punctures the myth of European illiteracy. Literacy exceeded 85% for most European groups; large majorities spoke English. Again, Mexico stood apart, with substantially lower literacy and English proficiency.

The pattern is further confirmed in incarceration data from 1900–1930 (Abramitzky et al., 2024). Once again, Mexicans were uniquely criminal.

Put differently: European differences were real but comparatively modest, and often modest from the start.7 That is not evidence of dramatic assimilation success; it is evidence that the initial gaps were small and heavily selected. The gap between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, historically and today, is far larger.8 Invoking the Irish or Italians as a reassurance tactic obscures more than it reveals.9

Modern Absimilation

Debates about assimilation often collapse because the term itself is elastic. What constitutes successful assimilation depends on the extent of convergence that has to occur before a foreigner is regarded as part of the ingroup. Let us begin with the harsher definition of assimilation. Hard assimilation means statistical indistinguishability from the native population across the outcomes that shape a society’s functioning: education, income, crime, family structure, and cultural norms. By contrast, soft assimilation asks a different question: do groups cease to experience one another as fundamentally alien? Do they blend socially, intermarry freely, share a common identity, and do the differences between them fade into the background of everyday life and cease to be politically salient? The rest of this section examines whether contemporary immigrant groups are assimilating in the hard sense, and the section following it examines assimilation in the soft sense.

Hard Assimilation: Becoming the Average

Measured against that standard, the question becomes more demanding. Do gaps actually close? Do they close fully? And do they stay closed across generations? The assumption that they will rests heavily on models that predict rapid convergence. As already implied by the outcome with European immigrants in the past, hard assimilation is almost impossible. If fellow Europeans do not fully converge with the native founding stock after a century, the belief that the newer arrivals who are even more genetically and culturally distant will borders on magical thinking.

Studies of intergenerational mobility consistently find that parental characteristics remain highly predictive of outcomes well into the second and third generations. De Philippis & Rossi (2020), for example, analyzed individual-level data from four waves of PISA scores, and find that immigrant children’s test scores tend to strongly resemble that of their parents’ country of origin. The same paper finds that students who come from higher-scoring countries tended to score better even when controlling for socioeconomic factors and looking at students that attended the same school.

But since performance is causal for both socioeconomic factors and the school one attends, controlling for the latter two will artificially reduce the gap for the former. The fact that much of the gap remains intact despite this is rather impressive.

The fact that immigrant performance is highly dependent on their pre-arrival characteristics is well-established in the literature (Behr & Fugger, 2020; Carabaña, 2011; Cataneo & Walter, 2015; Duncan & Trejo, 2015; Hanson & Liu, 2023; Ichou, 2014; Rindermann & Thompson, 2016; Werfhorst & Heath, 2019). Because of this, the constantly repeated findings that immigrants do not rapidly converge with natives in their level of human capital have been a frustration for economists.10 This frustration is fittingly captured by one such paper in its title “Why Do the Results of Immigrant Students Depend So Much on Their Country of Origin and so Little on Their Country of Destination?”

Let’s take a look at another example: education. As can be seen, second generation immigrants strongly resemble their first generation counterparts:

America is not alone in this regard. Data from Statistics Denmark also confirms this persistence. While non-Western immigrants do improve from first to second generation, particularly in language-specific tests, large gaps remain (Statistics Denmark, 2023). The optimism that the gap will fully close with time remains unsupported due to little to no additional convergence from the second to third generation (Statistics Denmark, 2024).

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Van de Beek et al. (2023) finds that the levels of human capital among immigrant groups, as measured by the “Cito score”, are strongly persistent across generations. The scores of second generation immigrants are strongly correlated with the first, and the scores of third generation immigrants with the second.

Unsurprisingly, the authors also find that differences in human capital are significant contributors to the economic disparities between various immigrant groups and natives.

Indeed, because immigrants in the Netherlands typically have lower human capital than the native Dutch, they also have lower intergenerational income mobility. However, when the immigrant group has an advantage in human capital compared to the native Dutch, then their intergenerational income mobility is also higher (Elk et al., 2024).

Turning back to the United States, one can look at the example of Hispanics for whether or not convergence occurs substantially. Chetty et al. (2018) predicted that “Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations. For example, a model of intergenerational mobility analogous to Becker and Tomes (1979) predicts that the gap will shrink from the 22 percentile difference between Hispanic and white parents observed in our sample to 10 percentiles for their children and to 6 percentiles in steady state”.11

But as shown near the beginning of this post, steady state is not a reality that empirically observed, and studies that actually examine intergenerational trajectories find far greater levels of persistence than what would be predicted by simple parent-child correlations. Moreover, Becker-Tomes-type models imply faster-than-geometric decay12 of group differences across generations, but the empirical evidence consistently finds the opposite: persistence is slower than geometric, meaning gaps close far more slowly than the model predicts (Solon, 2018).

The first generational jump is often mistaken for a trajectory; in reality, it may be the exception rather than the rule. Inappropriate extrapolations from a single generation paint an overly optimistic picture that is often not corroborated by more rigorous analyses. That transition is qualitatively different from all subsequent ones. Only the first generation is truly foreign-born; only that generation experiences a full reset of language, schooling, and labor-market exposure. Treating that initial adjustment as representative of what follows is wishful thinking. As shown with the examples from Europe, it is multi-generational persistence which is the norm.

So what has the progress of Hispanics looked like? Well, for starters, there is a well-known and persistent gap in various socioeconomic outcomes between racial groups in the United States. For example, household income:

However, there are two potential issues with visuals like these: compositional effects and ethnic attrition. In the case of the former, the addition of newer arrivals into the Hispanic population might mask any potential progress the long-staying members have made. In the case of the latter, a subset of the population may choose to stop identifying as “Hispanic” on surveys, and if the drop in identification is not random, it will bias intergenerational comparisons.

There are some analyses that have been done that get around these problems. For compositional effects, Villarreal & Tamborini (2023) utilized a dataset which links respondents from more than two decades of the Current Population Survey to their longitudinal tax records and found that second-generation Hispanic men experience slower income growth over the life cycle, falling behind the descendants of other immigrant groups as they age. More strikingly, third-generation Hispanic men appear to perform worse than the second generation, suggesting not gradual convergence but partial reversal.13

Meanwhile, in the book Generations of Exclusion: Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race (2008) by Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, the authors were able to follow Mexican immigrants and their descendants across four generations. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, there was little support for the assimilation narrative:

Sadly and directly in contradistinction to assimilation theory, the fourth generation differs the most from whites, with a college completion rate of only 6 percent [compared to 35 percent for whites of that era] (p. 108).

the educational progress of Mexican Americans does not improve over the generations … our data show no improvement in education over the generation-since-immigration and in some cases even suggest a decline (p. 116).

In education, which best determines life chances in the United States, assimilation is interrupted by the second generation and stagnates thereafter. Considering the education of parents, it can even be characterized as backwards. Mexican Americans, three or four generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, are less likely than the Mexican American second generation of similar characteristics to have completed either high school or college. Mexican Americans also have lower levels of schooling than any other major racial-ethnic group. Because education helps propel individuals toward assimilation on most other dimensions, a lack of educational progress thus limits Mexican American assimilation overall. In terms of adult socioeconomic status, there are no differences by generation-since-immigration (pp. 255-256).

On ethnic attrition, the research is more limited. But a small study by Richwine (2018) looking into Mexican immigrants sheds some insights. The cross-sectional portion of the NLSY97 is free of ethnic attrition because it included those with Hispanic ancestry even if they didn’t identify as Hispanic. Mexican immigrants of different generations are compared to white Americans on educational attainment, test score, work time, and earnings.

So, Mexicans reach parity with whites on completing at least high school and working time but continue to lag behind on everything else. However, because the sample sizes here were quite small, a more thorough analysis could not be done. As Richwine noted, “Although most people in their early 30s have completed their education, they are likely a decade or two away from the peak of their careers. How much third-generation Mexican-Americans will work and earn in their 40s and 50s is still unclear”.

There is also a problem with the definitions used. In the report, the third generation Mexican sample was “defined as having at least one Mexican-born grandparent. A more restrictive definition — e.g., requiring at least two or three Mexican-born grandparents — would leave the sample too small for meaningful analysis. But just how do education and earnings vary with the number of Mexican-born grandparents? This question is particularly important for assessing how Mexican immigration has affected average skill levels in the United States, since intermarriage could obscure the effects”. After all, the hereditarian hypothesis predicts that racial intermarriage with whites would raise the average performance of the descendants of Mexican immigrants. But the genes of Hispanics don’t disappear from the process. Rather, it just gets diluted and mixed into the broader population, which pulls down the national average.14

It’s also important to note that ethnic attrition doesn’t have the same effect for every group. While it seems to moderately understate the socioeconomic progress of Hispanics, the opposite is true for a group like Nigerians, where it’s been found that the Nigerians that cease to identify as such and instead choose to simply identify as “black” are more likely to be worse-off on measures of socioeconomic well-being (Emeka, 2019).

Speaking of blacks, most American blacks have a long history in the country, but exhibit very little convergence. The fact that most of them are not immigrants makes this even more striking. Centuries of living in this country did not eliminate the gaps between them and white Americans. It is even more astonishing when one considers that the cause of the black-white gap in socioeconomic well-being in the United States has always been due to innate differences in human capital, even in the past, while discrimination played little to no role. This is covered in-depth in the post below:

How Bad Was Anti-Black Discrimination in the Past?

Aaron

·

April 16, 2025

This is the full-length version of the article published on Aporia Magazine.

Read full story

But the Western world is not an exception. Group differences persist strongly, regardless of who it favors, throughout the world. Racial disparities follow similar patterns in South America (Bailey et al., 2014; Kustov & Pardelli, 2018).

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, overseas Chinese are greatly overrepresented among the affluent. The same is true for Indians in East Africa.

Economic disparities are not the only gaps that remain between generations. A literature review by Alesina & Giuliano (2015) looked into several dimensions of “cultural values” and find persistence across many of them, such as female labor market participation rates, tendency to live home with parents, preferences for economic redistribution, violence, etc. As their own conclusion states:

cultural values are persistent; when immigrants move to a place with different institutions, overwhelmingly their cultural values change gradually, if ever, but rarely within two generations (p. 904).

Additionally, cultural persistence can also be seen from differences in rates of cousin marriage. Globally, there are large differences in the prevalence of this institution (Bittles, 2022). When immigrants from countries where this practice is common move to the West, they bring this behavior with them, such as the Pakistani diaspora (Afzal et al., 2018; Nash, 2024). The precise figures are difficult to nail down, but estimates have suggested that anywhere from 40% to 60% of British-born Pakistanis marry a cousin or a closer relative (Nash, 2024). The fact that Pakistanis in the United Kingdom have high rates of cousin marriage is also confirmed by genetic data showing substantial inbreeding among them (Clark et al., 2019).

This is not to say that assimilation never happens, of course. Immigrants adopt elements of the host society, most notably the language, and they do so relatively quickly, far more quickly, for example, than religion (Jasso, 2009). But it is a mistake to confuse surface-level adaptation with deep assimilation. Learning the dominant language or adjusting outward behavior does not imply convergence in the traits that most strongly shape social outcomes.15 The evidence suggests that while immigrants can and do adapt to the forms of Western society, the more consequential differences, ones that determine how well societies function, are far more durable and are not erased by crossing a border.

Soft Assimilation: The Limits of Blending

Hard assimilation is not real; immigrants and their descendants remain distinct from prior populations and never become statistically indistinguishable. But this is a high bar to clear, stricter than what many people have in mind when they say “assimilation”. Soft assimilation—when formerly different groups cease to experience each other as fundamentally alien—can happen. In the American case, European ethnics did eventually soft assimilate, which is why they are so often brought up by immigration advocates as successful models. Today, few Americans can reliably distinguish someone of Irish descent from someone of German or colonial stock, and most white Americans have ancestry from multiple European sources. The old intra-European boundaries that once structured neighborhoods, churches, and voting blocs have largely dissolved. That transformation is real.

But it did not happen automatically, and it did not happen quickly. It required generational turnover, immigration restriction, geopolitical shocks, and the erosion of the social structures that sustained ethnic separation. Even then, what emerged was not a simple absorption of newcomers into an unchanged host people. The United States did not preserve its original ethnocultural composition; it underwent ethnogenesis. The resulting population is neither identical to the pre-mass migration nation nor a mere collection of immigrant fragments, but something intermediate.

The process by which European ethnic groups assimilated can be tracked by intermarriage, which is both a consequence of assimilation (spouses usually meet through social connections of some form) and a cause. Before 1924, there were low levels of intermarriage between Americans and “old” ethnics (Germans, Scandinavians, Irish), and approximately zero with “new” ethnics (Eastern and Southern Europeans), with barriers so strict as to be “castelike” (Pagnini & Morgan, 1990). From 1924 to approximately 1960, there was what was called the “triple melting pot”, with different Protestant groups intermarrying, different Catholic groups intermarrying, and different Jewish groups intermarrying, but very little marriage across religious divides (Herberg, 1952). From 1960 onwards, serious religious divides in the U.S. became a thing of the past, and intermarriage between various white ethnic groups in the U.S. became so common as to not be worth noting. For example, only 20% of Irish or German marriages in major cities in 1960 were endogamous, as compared to 60% in 1910 (Logan & Shin, 2013).

The three major milestones in the American assimilation of (already very similar) European ethnic groups were as follows:

1. World War I, which motivated the deliberate destruction through spontaneous violence of the largest non-American ethnic group in the US, Germans, and their forcible assimilation. Americans banned the German language in schools across the country and forced the German press to shut down or switch to English. German businesses were boycotted, schools, foods, streets, and towns were renamed, German nationals and even a few U.S. citizens were interned in camps, and at least one German was lynched. German public life in the U.S. ended overnight.
2. The Quota Acts. The single most important reason Ellis Island groups eventually became American was the decades-long near-complete cutoff of immigration from their origin countries. This started with WWI, and was legally locked in place by the 1924 Quota Act, which set a formula for Old World yearly immigration of 2% of the foreign-born population from that origin recorded in the 1890 census. This was intended to stabilize America’s ethnic mix. English was already the language of upward mobility, and without a constant supply of non-English speakers into ethnic enclaves, it quickly drove other languages out of daily usage. A universal common language in turn facilitated more interpersonal contacts and stronger social connections with Americans and with other immigrant groups, which began breaking down the “castelike” barriers preventing intermarriage. Conversely, social ties with the Old Country weakened. Brides could no longer be sought there, overseas business ties were replaced with domestic ones, and with no infinite reserve of desperate immigrant labor business owners were compelled to look to other ethnic groups for workers, ending extreme occupational segregation. Relative size of ethnic groups is one of the strongest determinants of endogamy; smaller ethnic groups intermarry more because the pool of co-ethnic partners is smaller. The same applies to other social bonds. By shrinking the pool of European ethnics, immigration restriction encouraged assimilation.
3. Civil Rights and the consequent white flight, which sealed the assimilation process. When they were geographically separated, white ethnics and blacks could both be part of the Democratic New Deal coalition, but when they were forced together, this became impossible. Irish, Italian, Jewish, or American, every white group physically near blacks faced race riots, muggings, rapes, home invasions, murders, graffiti, urban disorder, and their kids being attacked in schools. White ethnic groups had big cultural and small genetic differences, but they paled in comparison to the massive gulf between them and blacks. In the same way that conflict with a far more alien enemy forced the American colonists together, exposure to black behavior brought European ethnics and American whites together. More importantly, high levels of black criminal violence and disorder, tacitly supported by the post-Civil Rights state, caused whites of every ethnic group to flee the cities (“white flight”), breaking up the urban enclaves that sustained geographic segregation between different white ethnic groups. With linguistic and religious divides already breached, this broke down the last major social barrier between Americans and European ethnics, leaving them one group politically and socially.

The question for contemporary America is not whether some adaptation occurs. The question is whether distinct populations are moving toward mutual indistinguishability in identity. Soft assimilation is not about identical test scores or income percentiles. It is about whether the boundaries that once separated groups lose their social meaning. In the European case, those boundaries eventually blurred. Whether the same process is unfolding today, and at what speed, is far less clear. Intermarriage rates for Hispanic and Asian groups are fairly high, however an important difference between modern America and the America of the early 20th century lies in what identities are valuable.

The American nation of the early 20th century was confident, self-conscious, and strong. They knew who they were, they knew the newcomers were not them, and they demanded assimilation as Americans as the price of acceptance into broader American life, which, as the people who created the country, they controlled. For most of the critical assimilation period 1880–1970, being American was valuable and tangible material and intangible social and political rewards.

By the time this changed with the Civil Rights revolution, which gave power and privileges to non-American minorities, the assimilation process was too far along, and the half-hearted attempts to create European ethnic Civil Rights groups to match their black/Amerindian/Chicano/Puerto Rican counterparts flopped ignominiously.

In post-Civil Rights America, being non-American is valuable. It gets you privileges (affirmative action), access to ethnic networks and ethnic organizations illegal for Americans, pride and representation, and money and sinecures for would-be cultural activists. Instead of potential edge-cases trying to pass themselves off as American, you get a “flight from white”, as people flee to identities that can offer them something. Man is a Machiavellian ape. For that reason, moderately high intermarriage rates alone are no guarantee of even “soft” assimilation, as mixed families and individuals are incentivized to identify with their non-American heritage. Intermarriage, like assimilation, can work two ways.

Let’s take a look at group differences in politics. Specifically, one can compare the political variation within white Americans to between whites and nonwhite groups in America. The most common approach to measuring political differences between demographic groups is party identification (i.e., Democrat vs. Republican). However, this approach has several flaws:

• It reduces complex beliefs to a single label. People have opinions on dozens of issues (e.g., taxes, guns, immigration, free speech, welfare, foreign policy, etc.). Party identification collapses all of that into one binary choice, which hides important differences in what people actually believe.16
• Parties don’t represent the full range of possible views. In a two-party system, parties position themselves to win elections, not to represent every ideological possibility. Many viewpoints fall outside the range represented by either party.
• Minority groups get “compressed” into the closest party. If a group’s political views don’t fit neatly into the existing party spectrum, its members will still usually choose whichever party is closer. That can make groups look politically similar even when their underlying views are quite different.17
• It exaggerates some differences and hides others. Because the political system forces everyone into two camps, party identification can make divisions between Democrats and Republicans look larger than they really are while masking deeper differences between demographic groups.

Because of all this, using party identification winds up overstating the amount of political variation among white Americans of different ethnic backgrounds, while understating the amount of political variation between whites and other racial groups. When ancestry groups are compared across multiple political questions (i.e., economic redistribution, size of government, gun ownership, free speech, and postmaterialist values), European populations tend to cluster closely together relative to non-European groups. Principal component analyses of survey data reveal that while European ancestries may spread across the Republican–Democrat spectrum, they nonetheless occupy a narrow region of policy space compared to the far larger separation between whites and other racial groups.

Even within racial groups the structure of opinion reveals striking separation. If we compare the average views of white Democrats and white Republicans across several policy questions, the ideological distance between them is often smaller than the distance separating whites as a whole from other racial groups. In some cases, there is virtually no overlap at all.

Returning to the PCA model from earlier, each racial group’s beliefs can be broken down into their Democrat and Republican subgroups. The results are striking: brown Republicans barely exist, and to the extent that they do, they’re much more similar to white Democrats than white Republicans, while the results for American Asians are more ambiguous, as noted below:

The broad Asian group is more interesting. Projected onto the European left-right axis, they would mostly overlap while being shifted considerably to the left. But the entire Asian opinion curve is also offset in some dimension orthogonal to US partisan politics. My tentative view is that this difference is related to individualism/self-expression values, which are not as strongly partisan among European-Americans. This model might describe how an Asian Republican can be a moderate on economics, but less hostile to restrictions on speech and gun rights (AnechoicMedia, 2018).

Because of this, the claim among some immigration advocates that nonwhites will become Republicans with time if the party simply dropped its nativist rhetoric is greatly mistaken. Party identification does not measure the same set of beliefs between racial groups, which makes any supposed potential political gains with nonwhites less meaningful. It is far from obvious that incorporating nonwhites into the political coalition is even desirable, given their political preferences.18

Another revealing indicator is how different populations understand their own identities. Survey research shows that white Americans, across political lines, are more likely to regard being “American” as central to who they are than being “white”. This is not true for nonwhites.

What about identity across generations? A 2020 Pew survey found that only 14% of Hispanics primarily describe themselves as “American”. Even among third-generation Hispanics, only about one-third adopt that label as their primary identity. Nearly half instead identify primarily with their ancestral national origin, while many others prefer broader pan-ethnic labels such as “Latino” or “Hispanic” (Gonzalez-Barrera, 2020). These attachments do not disappear with time in the way immigration advocates predict.19

Similar patterns appear among American Asians. Roughly half report that most of their close friendships are with members of their own racial group, including among younger cohorts. Many Asians claim to feel pressure to conceal aspects of their identity in order to fit into broader American society—hardly the behavior of a population that experiences itself as fully integrated (Ruiz et al., 2023). Indeed, a 2023 report by The Asian American Foundation found that a large majority of American Asians say they do not feel that they fully belong in the United States, including more than four-fifths of those aged sixteen to twenty-four, the overwhelming majority of whom were born in the country. Among Asians who felt like they didn’t belong, 43% claimed that a major reason was “not seeing others like them in positions of power”. This is anything but successful assimilation into the American identity.

Conclusion

These immigrants adopt the language of the native Americans;20 they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race (The Passing Of The Great Race, 1916, p. 81).

When Madison Grant wrote this at the time, he had been concerned about the debasement of the original colonial American stock by the new Ellis Island arrivals. His fears were not unwarranted at the time, and, in spite of nativist resistance, the Ellis Islanders eventually brought about the end of the original American nation as it had been conceived, and replaced it with a new hybrid nation. The culture and politics of America had been permanently altered, with the ethnogenesis process becoming fully complete in the following decades. The American identity under went a radical transformation, never to be quite the same again as it once was.

Ironically enough, nonwhites, through collectively awakening the survival instincts of all white Americans of different ethnic backgrounds, were partially responsible for pushing the European assimilation project to its completion. Intra-European differences were politically salient at the time, but they pale in comparison to differences between whites and nonwhites today. As America navigates itself in the modern world, it is becoming increasingly apparent that these new nonwhite arrivals are unassimilable.

Nations do not always collapse in dramatic explosions. Oftentimes, they decay more quietly than that—through comforting stories that make difficult realities feel unnecessary to confront. The myth of assimilation is one of those stories. It tells us that populations are infinitely malleable, that culture dissolves in the solvent of American institutions, that time alone will sand down every difference. It reassures us that the future will resemble the past because we want it to. And once that belief takes hold, it becomes a license for complacency. If assimilation is automatic, then policy hardly matters. Numbers hardly matter. Composition hardly matters. The pot will melt eventually, so why worry about what goes into it?21

But the evidence points in a darker direction. Human populations are not blank slates, and the traits that shape economic, cultural, and political life are not easily erased by borders or bureaucracies. They persist across generations. They reshape the societies that receive them. And once demographic changes occur at a large enough scale, attempting to rectify and reverse it through policy becomes an uphill battle. This is the part of the immigration debate that polite conversation avoids: immigration is not just an economic policy. It is an entire nation-building (or nation-ending) policy. It determines who the future electorate will be, what norms will dominate, what institutions will be sustained or dismantled. Its effects unfold slowly, over generations, which makes them easy to ignore in the present and extremely difficult to undo later. By the time the consequences are obvious, the foreigners responsible for them become powerful and influential enough to demand permanent acceptance.

The comforting image of the melting pot suggests a kind of inevitability—different ingredients thrown together, eventually dissolving into a single homogeneous substance. But history offers a different metaphor. Societies are not melting pots. Rather, they are closer to ecosystems. Introduce new elements in small numbers and they may eventually adapt to the environment. Introduce them in large numbers and the environment eventually adapts to them. And ecosystems, once altered, do not easily revert to their original state.

The real danger, then, is not simply that the assimilation story is wrong. It is that it is believed so confidently that any serious consideration of the long-run stakes rarely make it into the mainstream discourse. A society convinced that differences will inevitably disappear will never ask what happens if they do not. The fairy tale is repeated because it is comforting. Reality is much less so. But reality has a habit of asserting itself eventually. By the time it does, the comforting myths that once justified complacency will no longer matter, because the world they described will already be gone. Something new will have taken its place. And it is far from obvious that this something new will resemble the American success story that made the country worth coming to in the first place.

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18

Compositional effects matter here too, as they can also falsely create an illusion of intergenerational progress. Take the issue of immigrant politics. Because later generations of immigrants contains descendants of much older immigration waves (who were primarily Europeans), while newer generations are composed almost entirely of recent arrivals after 1965, the generations being compared are not lineages of the same families across time, but entirely different populations. As a result, the observed narrowing of political differences by generation can emerge even if no individual or family ever assimilates at all, simply because later-generation categories contain a higher share of people descended from earlier immigrant waves with different baseline attitudes. Without tracking the same immigrant cohorts and their descendants across generations, generational comparisons risk confusing changes in population composition with genuine cultural or political assimilation. This is why accounting for compositional effects are important. After all, “immigrants” are not a homogenous category and there is no country called “Immigrasia” where all the immigrants come from.

So, how well is political assimilation actually going? Ancestry effects dominate, and Mexicans remain below the national average in terms of identifying as Republican, whereas Southeastern Europeans with a longer history in the country do actually identify more strongly as Republican than the national average:

As Jason Richwine notes:

Among individuals with four U.S.-born grandparents, 47 percent of NW Europeans identify as Republicans, compared to 38 percent of SE Europeans and 26 percent of Mexicans. These results imply that the political allegiances that immigrants develop have remarkable staying power. Tenure only modestly attenuates the differences across ancestry groups.