ACTION

IN light of that, Garrett Jones, with a formidable bibliography, has documented how people tend to import political attitudes and cultural norms like luggage. When a people migrate, they bring attitudes derived from previous culture with them. Those imports ultimately change the receiving country's government, economy, and future. The past is prologue it seems. And that cultural persistence across generations is real, people never completely assimilate.

Jones found 3 dominant indicators that link the past political attitudes and cultural norms to the present: State history, Agricultural history, and Technological history since 1500 ad.  SAT for short.

Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are illustrative. They have had a relative history of immigration whence came a high SAT scoring people with the legacy of good governance, competent bureaucracy, and Confucian culture.

Summarizing, when people migrate, they bring their SAT score with them, which means that a people's past is a better predictor of economic success than geopolitical history. HEY, that negates the standard narrative that the left-wing banters, that global poverty of today is overwhelmingly due to the so-called brutal, post 1500 post-Columbus oppression, you know, the standard woke garbage--AGAIN!

Jones' findings are confirmed in the findings of Diego Comin of harvard, Bill Easterly of nyu, and Rick Gong of the u of california, that concluded that 78% of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is associated with technological differences in 1500 ad and not attributed to the post-1500 slave trade, colonialism, or post-Independence factors(1).

Further, economists Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc found that 46% of home-country attitudes towards trust persist in 2nd up to 4th generation immigrants. UCLA's Paola Giuliani found that 1st thru 3rd generation people whose parents came from countries with higher savings rates tended to save noticeably more than similar people whose parents came from countries with lower saving rates, such financial behavior being another predictor of national prosperity.

To be sure, there are outliers, for example, attitudes toward policing and religion aren't transplanted. However, the rule holds up well despite the outliers and a people's past does a good job of predicting outcomes. For example 60% of Hispanics compared to only 47% of whites believe people have hard lives not because of their attitude to the form of government but because government benefits do not go far enough, according to the Pew Research.

All this is to say that immigration has long-term consequences and that not all immigration is alike, which means the narrow conception of diversity the left-wing forces upon US comes at a dangerously high cost. A mountain of data and studies shows that increased ethnic diversity lowers trust in local neighborhoods and acts as a multiplier social conflict for the nation. Naturally, with that decrease, the social safety nets begin to fail, the result being usually a bigger, more pervasive, more ineffective and more corrupt government. Even the Journal of Economic Surveys noted the destruction of what gives the US its standard of living and freedom when it stated: "Ethnic diversity seems to lead to a shift from public spending on public goods to public provision of private goods, arguably because the latter can be targeted to particular power-enhancing groups."

Advanced countries like the US, experiencing or even welcoming endless waves of immigration that are transplanting cultural traits derived from those with low SAT scores can survive in the short term. But they are essentially plundering the legacy of those who came before, mortgaging their future by satisfying left-wing ideological fetishes and demands for cheap labor. All this makes human flourishing increasingly difficult and ultimately on a downward scale. The world will ultimately be worse off as a result. Where's the progress in that. But, that's what the left-wing supports and wants more of.