Why Migrants Tend to Make the Countries They Move To Like the Ones They Left. By William Meijer.
The observation:
Macroeconomist Garett Jones summarizes the scientific literature on this question …
He identifies a consistent pattern: migrants assimilate culturally and economically to their destination country, but never completely — not even after four or more generations, nor after centuries. Whatever strengths and weaknesses they possess tend to persist across generations. And for that reason, for better or worse, migrants tend to make the countries they move to like the ones they left.
About the book by Garrett Jones:
Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. …
Built upon mainstream, well-reviewed academic research that hasn’t pierced the public consciousness, this book offers a compelling refutation of an unspoken consensus that a nation’s economic and political institutions won’t be changed by immigration. …
And since most of the world’s technological innovations come from just a handful of nations, Jones concludes, the entire world has a stake in whether migration policy will help or hurt the quality of government and thus the quality of scientific breakthroughs in those rare innovation powerhouses.
The explanation (back to William Meijer):
Two things follow migrant families across generations, geographies, and institutions: their familial environment and their genes. Everything else — from schools and laws to peer groups and governments — usually changes.
This section makes the case that the familial environment is insufficient to explain cultural persistence and, thus, that genetics contribute to observed racial differences in culture.
Culture has deep roots: it is partly rooted in psychology, which is itself partly rooted in biology. Because these layers differ in malleability, cultural traits do not assimilate uniformly. Traits shaped primarily by the immediate social environment tend to change relatively easily, whereas those more deeply embedded in biopsychological dispositions tend to persist. Culture is therefore better understood as a hierarchy of traits than as a collection of equally malleable practices. The Culture Iceberg organizes this hierarchy into four domains, ranging from the deepest and least malleable to the most visible and environmentally responsive.
Abilities:
Abilities … are the deepest layer of the model and, in general, the most resistant to change. Because they shape how people think, learn, and interact, they have important cultural, institutional, technological, and economic implications.
Cognitive ability is probably the most consequential human ability. It is difficult to observe directly, highly stable over time, moderately associated with individual outcomes, and strongly associated with collective outcomes.
Cognitive ability has broad implications because individuals with higher cognitive abilities tend to cooperate more effectively with strangers in mutually beneficial ways (Drouvelis & Pearce, 2025).
At the individual level, each additional IQ point predicts roughly 1% higher wages. At the national level, each additional IQ point predicts approximately 6–7% higher GDP per worker (Jones, 2011). Through the compounding effects of social interactions, relatively small differences in individual traits produce large differences in collective outcomes.
PISA mathematics performance, a reasonable proxy for cognitive ability at the population level, reveals that third-generation (and later) Americans continue to display large racial differences that broadly mirror those observed in their ancestral homelands (Crémieux, 2023; OECD, 2023). …
Emotional suppression, an emotional regulation strategy, also influences large-scale cooperation … The inhibition of strong emotional expression in favor of outward calm and social harmony may have become more common among populations that evolved in cold environments (Sun, 2025). … Evidence from the United States suggests that familial resemblance in emotional suppression is substantially genetic, with shared-environment influences near zero (McRae et al., 2017). …
Taken together, these examples illustrate a broader pattern: cultural assimilation appears to have only a limited effect on abilities because they are constrained by the genes from which they arise. …
The deep roots of institutions and prosperity:
The previous section argued that genetics contribute to the persistence of population differences in abilities, preferences, beliefs, and customs. If culture is partly genetic and shapes institutions more than the reverse, then genetic differences between populations should predict long-term differences in institutional policies and outcomes. The evidence is consistent with this prediction.
In The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Henrich (2020) attributes Northwestern Europeans’ exceptional capacity for cooperation with non-kin to the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage. The main problem with his explanation is that cousin marriage already appears to have been uncommon in pre-Christian Europe….
In Why Nations Fail (2012), Acemoglu and Robinson — who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on institutions and prosperity — argue that the wealth of nations is determined not by geography or culture but by political and economic institutions: inclusive institutions, which distribute power broadly and secure property rights for the many, generate sustained growth, while extractive institutions, which channel resources to a narrow elite, suppress it. The problem with their theory is that inclusive institutions need a specific type of human capital to function. Even the Committee for the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (2024) acknowledges that their empirical strategy cannot disentangle the effects of inclusive institutions from the independent effects of the European settlers’ human capital. Good institutions undoubtedly generate positive feedback loops once they exist, but they first require populations capable of sustaining them.
Supporting this view, countries with high-quality governance — as measured by control of corruption, the rule of law, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality — tend to trace a larger share of their genetic ancestry to populations that were technologically advanced 500 years ago. …
There appears to be a threshold of human capital below which stable good governance becomes difficult to realize. …
Conclusion:
The tendency of historical outcomes to follow genes across geography further supports the notion that population differences in human capital are partly genetic. If these differences were primarily products of institutions or geography, then historical outcomes should remain more strongly associated with places than with the populations that move between them. Instead, institutional quality and prosperity appear to follow populations across environments.
That genetic ancestry can predict institutional policies and outcomes hundreds of years in advance, even in recently admixed populations, suggests that human capital shapes institutions more than institutions shape human capital and, thus, that genetics likely contribute to observed differences in institutional, technological, and socioeconomic outcomes.
The direction of causality:
- Biology shapes psychology more than psychology shapes biology.
- Psychology shapes culture more than culture shapes psychology.
- Culture shapes institutions more than institutions shape culture.
- Institutions shape technology more than technology shapes institutions.
- Technology shapes socioeconomic environments more than socioeconomic environments shape technology.
This causal asymmetry exists because more malleable domains are built upon less malleable ones…. Both nature and nurture matter, but the ability to nurture is itself a manifestation of nature.
Implications for migration:
Meijer’s Law explains why, for better or worse, migrants tend to make the countries they move to like the ones they left. Their biological, psychological, and cultural characteristics shape the institutions of the destination country—especially inclusive institutions—more than the institutions shape them. It also explains why imported institutions consistently fail when the biological, psychological, and cultural capital required to sustain them is not adequate.
The evidence suggests that today, countries tend to be orderly or corrupt, rich or poor, because of the people who live in them.
The arguments presented here should not be understood as claiming that ancestry itself determines institutional success and prosperity. Rather, it is the psychocultural traits populations possess — the abilities, preferences, beliefs, and customs that enable large-scale cooperation — that matter.
So choose your immigrants carefully.
Speaking of which, here is Peter Sutherland (1946–2018), an Irish statesman and businessman, who is widely recognized as the “father of globalisation” for his pivotal role in establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) and shaping the multilateral trading system, and who served as the UN Special Representative for International Migration from 2006 to 2017:
We must use migration to turn the English people into a minority in England. This will allow us to undermine the identity of the native English and import a new majority that will end the very idea of England. This is critical for the globalism to take hold of England.
A reader writes:
“It also explains why imported institutions consistently fail when the biological, psychological, and cultural capital …”
This is obvious to anyone who’s worked in the third world, especially Melanesia or Africa.
The western idea that if you keep throwing mud (money) at the wall long enough it’ll eventually start to stick is manifestly wrong. It just doesn’t work.
Individually they can present as highly intelligent people, but collectively they’re a disaster as far a running complex western-style institutions is concerned. The key areas where the problems occur are always:
- inability to plan long-term
- inability to handle institutional funds honestly.