> But then we have to wonder as well whether NYC and its surrounding environs would have evolved into the global capital of finance, culture, technology, etc., that it is.
I don’t dispute that immigration enables ambitious people from all over the world who are anti-social enough to leave their homelands to come to America and make a lot of money. How you can bill that as a good thing is what I don’t understand. Ordinary Americans would be better off if NYC wasn’t the global capital of finance and technology. The Netherlands seems to be doing just fine being modestly less rich than America.
> Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather.
Immigration isn’t an inevitability, especially when your country stretches from coast to coast with a relatively narrow land border on the south side. Between 1910 and 1970, the US foreign-born population shrank from 15% to under 5%, even with the advent of the aviation industry. The subsequent growth of that figure was entirely a policy choice.
> Ordinary Americans would be better off if NYC wasn’t the global capital of finance and technology.
You seem to assume that the things you like about America would have come into being, and remained in existence, in the absence of the things you don't like. But history might suggest otherwise.
> The Netherlands seems to be doing just fine being modestly less rich than America.
Um: Absent the rich, mongrel United States and its industrial capacity, the folks in the Netherlands might well be speaking German as one of their official languages and still being ruled from Berlin. In late 1940, Germany had conquered basically all of western Europe and was not far from starving Britain into submission; U.S. aid helped keep the Brits afloat. Not even the Red Army would likely have defeated Germany without the U.S.'s so-called Arsenal of Democracy, which provided crucial materiel to the Soviets, helping them to avoid being conquered and colonized by the Third Reich — with their non-Aryan population turned into enslaved workers and/or intentionally starved to death (see: the Wannsee Protocol).
Or (continuing this alternative-history exercise), perhaps the Dutch would be speaking Russian after Stalin, Zhukov, et al., not only conquered Germany but rolled through Western Europe to the English Channel. But oh yes: The U.S.'s policy of containment — backstopped by its nuclear umbrella, the Marshall Plan for a time, and eventually the U.S-led NATO coalition — seems to have worked, buying time during which the Soviet Union finally collapsed of its own weight. Without U.S. economic might, it's doubtful that this would have happened.
For that matter, today's ambitious China likely wouldn't be a concern to our Dutch contemporaries either: China probably would have ended up as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, submissive to Tokyo. That didn't happen, again thanks to the wealthy, stupendously-productive United States.
The alternative-history conjectures above are just speculation, of course. Obviously, much change would have occurred in the decades since the end of WWII.
But your assertions have the ring of Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer wishful thinking.
I don’t dispute that immigration enables ambitious people from all over the world who are anti-social enough to leave their homelands to come to America and make a lot of money. How you can bill that as a good thing is what I don’t understand. Ordinary Americans would be better off if NYC wasn’t the global capital of finance and technology. The Netherlands seems to be doing just fine being modestly less rich than America.
> Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather.
Immigration isn’t an inevitability, especially when your country stretches from coast to coast with a relatively narrow land border on the south side. Between 1910 and 1970, the US foreign-born population shrank from 15% to under 5%, even with the advent of the aviation industry. The subsequent growth of that figure was entirely a policy choice.