The Pot That Refuses to Melt: Assimilation as a modern fairy tale. By Alden Whitfield at Heretical Insights.
Excerpts from a much longer, slightly academic paper that reports empirical research data on a topic that is critical to the continued existence of western culture and white societies.
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.
The reason is simple and obvious, but is hotly-denied by the left: much human behavior and capability is genetically influenced. (What did you expect? Our genes are our blueprints.) Further, we carry unexpressed or recessive genes from the general population we came from, so our offspring statistically tend to move towards population averages.
For example, the expected IQ of a child is the average of the IQs of the two parents, but moved by 40% towards the mean. Thus, a white kid born to parents with IQs of 115 and 125 would have an expected IQ of 120 moved 40% towards the white mean of 100, namely an expected IQ of 112 (120 is 20 points above the mean of 100, 40% of 20 is 8, and 120 less 8 is 112). There is of course random genetic variation around the expected value, but the average IQ of all such kids would be 112.
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 intergenerational 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 overrepresented at Oxford and Cambridge.
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.
No, the persistence of group differences is not due to financial or social inheritance:
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 slaveholding 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. …
The communists implemented lefty policy good and hard, but even they failed to eliminate group differences:
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. …
Positive shocks only have a temporary effect:
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. …
No, group differences do not persist because of the environment either:
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.
Oh, the Irish in the US! No, the melting pot didn’t work as the left likes to fantasize, because they omit natural selection:
Irish immigrants, we’re told, arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries poor, urban, Catholic, and heavily overrepresented 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. …
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%. …
This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave. 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. …
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….
Immigrants change your country:
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 … 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.
Another blasphemy — less able immigrants make a country more left wing:
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. …
The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics….
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. …
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. …
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….
Yet anther blasphemy — it took heavy immigration restrictions to break up ethnic ghettos in the US:
he 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….
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.
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.
The blasphemies keep coming — the contrast with the relatively awfully-behaved blacks brought all the white groups together:
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. …
The implications for enlightened free-market societies today are dark:
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. …
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.
So choose your immigrants wisely. Is it already too late for the US? Australia? Certainly it is for the native American Indians and Australian aboriginals.
Reality is a harder task master than left-wing fantasies.
