13/ My point with this thread is not to provide any specific commentary on the border crap going on now but to point out that the “order keeping out chaos” mental model of ethnonationalism is really really toxic and sociological nonsense.
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14/ With climate change pressure this sort of thing is going to get far worse, not better. So if we don’t upgrade our mental models of migration, we risk destroying vast amounts of cultural capital trying to preserve itself.
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15/ All the varied cuisines you can enjoy in any major city are just the tip of the iceberg of what gets saved/preserved/redundantly replicated through migration. This is planetary scale distributed computation on an unreliable hard drive.
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16/ I think most countries in the world have some understanding of this: that for thousands of years the world has been based on a system of interdependent cultural capital insurance against local disruptions that relies on migration calculus
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17/ I suspect American-born natives don’t get the enormous value of this system because they’ve so far enjoyed a history bereft of outbound migration memories/narratives. It’s only inbound Ellis island stuff which makes them feel benevolent.
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18/ The 2 domestic migration stories most Americans know — Underground Railroad and Grapes of Wrath — just don’t convey the significance and richness of population movements in human history. Americans have never had to*leave* America in large numbers.
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19/ To me this means this is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation that is built on remembering only the “gracious host” side of one half of immigration: arrivals. The US has NO sense of departures.
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20/ First-generation immigration stories are only half-told because they half-heard. Americans ask, “why did you come to America?” expecting to hear flattering things about their own society. They are rarely curious about the stories of departures. Why?
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21/ I know why: the unspoken assumption is “well of course you wanted to leave because it’s a shithole country compared to Great America, who wouldn’t?”
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22/ So curiously, even as immigrant stories get woven into the American story, it’s curiously half-woven. Except for Albion’s Seed people who supply an origin myth, no other story is welcome in the American grand narrative.
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22a addendum/ Basically every microstory of immigration is read in a self-serving, other-demonizing way by Americans, so of course the world looks like a demonic place delivering half-demons to the shores, some of whom are to be “saved” and “redeemed” by evangelical Americanism
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As it ever was. Just look at any number of 19th century immigrant groups. I understand your dismay about the self-serving natavist mythology, and obtuseness regarding the rest of the world (i.e., “overseas”), but this is a core feature of U.S. culture.

