“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world. It wasn’t that people invented these institutions first and then they began to think about the world differently. Rather, this was a kind of evolving process where people began to think about the world a little bit differently because their families had been transformed, so they tended to adopt different kinds of laws and think about new kinds of laws to account for this. As European societies became increasingly dominated by monogamous nuclear families in the High Middle Ages, for instance, the laws being created centered increasingly on the individual and on their intentions, rights, and obligations as separate from their kin groups. Those laws then shaped the world that they subsequently grew up in even more, and you had this kind of coevolution between our psychology on one hand and our social norms and institutions on the other.”
That’s in the Harvard Gazette from September 2020! The book was covered in the New York Times and Psychology Today. So what’s with the innuendo?
America is a nation of immigrants, including Stephen Miller's grandparents. People have tried to make this sort of argument in the past when they didn't want poor Irish, Germans, Italians, Asians looking for opportunity, not to mention there's always been a Latino immigrant population.
You can't invoke America's track record of immigration without noting that, the last time the foreign born population hit present levels, the country pumped the brakes on immigration through restrictive immigration policy that dropped the foreign-born population from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. The country also aggressively pushed immigrants to abandon their cultural identities and assimilate into Anglo culture.
You also can't overlook that prior waves of mass immigration also caused decades of negative consequences in the meantime, from the emergence of nationality-based political machines in major cities to the Italian mafia. And you can't overlook that mass immigration changed the culture of parts of the country permanently, in many cases for the worse. Immigrants that formed enclaves in New Jersey never fully adopted the American attitudes towards civic society, the role of government, the rule of law, etc., that still exist in pockets of the country like New Hampshire.
It's just the liberal version of Bush thinking that he could turn Iraq into a democracy using laws on paper.