Immigration and Cultural Baggage

I was talking with my wife in the car the other day, as married couples sometimes do, solving the problems of civilization somewhere between one stoplight and the next. We got onto immigration, culture, authoritarianism, North Korea, and the strange question of why people leave one society for another. At some point she said, “You should write a blog post about this.” So here we are. Since this is something of a rant, perhaps Peter Griffin provides the appropriate inspiration: you know what really grinds my gears?

We often describe America as a “melting pot,” but I am not sure that metaphor really works. A melting pot suggests that everybody gets thrown into the same cauldron and eventually becomes the same homogeneous substance. America seems more like a tossed salad. We have a predominant culture surrounded by countless subcultures, regional cultures, religious cultures, ethnic cultures, occupational cultures, and cultures within cultures. The ingredients retain something of themselves while sharing the same bowl, and I think that diversity is one of America’s strengths.

But here is the question that interests me: how far can that diversity go before cultures begin colliding in ways that cannot be reconciled? What happens when one cultural value says, “You are free to live differently from me,” while another says, “No, you must live the way I tell you”? At that point we are no longer merely talking about different foods, holidays, clothing, languages, or religious traditions. We are talking about competing ideas concerning freedom, authority, individual rights, and who gets to tell whom how to live.

The Exit Test

Our conversation somehow wandered into North Korea and Kim Jong Un. North Korea is an interesting example because the contrast between the ruling elite and ordinary citizens is so striking. The country has experienced persistent food insecurity and severe restrictions on everyday life while its leadership appears to live quite comfortably. Kim Jong Un certainly looks like a man who has never missed any meals, while many of the people over whom he rules have not enjoyed the same luxury.

What really gets me, however, is not merely the poverty. It is that North Korea severely restricts people from leaving. Human Rights Watch reported that border guards remained under orders to shoot unauthorized border crossers in 2025, and only a small number of North Koreans now manage to escape to South Korea compared with the numbers before the border crackdown. Think about what that means for a moment. Your political system is so wonderful that you have to threaten people with imprisonment or death to prevent them from escaping it.

That leads me to what I will call the exit test. If people want to leave your country, let them leave. If practically everybody would leave once you stopped forcing them to stay, perhaps that tells you something important about your system. Maybe the problem is not that your citizens lack patriotism. Let’s be honest here. Maybe your system simply sucks. 

“They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

Steven Hassan’s Influence Continuum offers an interesting way of thinking about authoritarian control. On the healthy side of the continuum, people are “free to leave,” while destructive systems tend toward the idea that there are “no legitimate reasons to leave.” Hassan developed that framework primarily for coercive groups and relationships, but the principle seems remarkably applicable to governments as well. A healthy system does not need to imprison people in order to preserve itself.

Of course, that does not mean every country must have completely unrestricted borders or that citizenship means nothing. A nation has legitimate reasons to regulate who enters, who becomes a citizen, and under what conditions. I am talking about something more fundamental: the basic freedom of a human being to say, “I do not want to live under this system anymore,” and to go somewhere else without being SHOT for trying!

Authoritarianism Is an Equal Opportunity Temptation

This brings me back home because I see a disturbing amount of dissatisfaction with liberal democracy in the United States. By liberal democracy, I do not mean the Democratic Party or contemporary political liberalism. I mean the older political idea that government should be limited by law, individual rights should be protected, political power should be constrained by institutions, rulers should be accountable, and citizens should have substantial freedom to speak, worship, associate, disagree, and live differently from one another.  Not anarchy, but libertarianism.

That system is messy, frustrating, and inefficient. It produces election results we hate, laws we think are stupid, and politicians we cannot believe anybody voted for. Democracy means that people we think are idiots get to vote, and sometimes they win. That can be maddening, but the alternatives have some rather serious drawbacks.  Drawbacks that we really should consider. The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.

What concerns me is that authoritarian temptation seems to be appearing on multiple political fringes. Some revolutionary movements on the far left have historically romanticized communist systems that concentrate enormous power in the state. Meanwhile, some elements of the far right, including thinkers associated with the so-called Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement, openly question liberal democracy and entertain much more hierarchical forms of political rule. The ideologies are different, the vocabulary is different, and the flags are certainly different, but the temptation underneath them begins to sound strangely familiar.

The sales pitch usually comes down to something like this: give us enough power and we will fix society. We will make people behave correctly, believe correctly, speak correctly, organize society correctly, and finally solve all these annoying problems created by people who refuse to cooperate. That is precisely where I become suspicious, because authoritarian systems always have wonderful plans for people who agree with them. The real test is what happens to the person who says no.

I do not particularly care whether the person trying to control my life comes carrying a hammer and sickle, wearing a crown, waving an American flag, clutching a Bible, quoting Marx, or carrying a PowerPoint presentation explaining why some enlightened technocrat should run everything. My question is the same: how much power are you asking me to surrender, and what happens when I refuse? If your political vision only works when everybody is forced to comply, then perhaps what you have built is not utopia. Perhaps you have simply found another route to authoritarianism.  A golden cage may be comfortable, even luxurious, but it is still a prison if you are not free to leave.

America Is a Salad, but It Still Needs a Bowl

Now we arrive at immigration, which is where this conversation gets uncomfortable. People come to the United States from all over the world, bringing languages, religions, cuisines, music, clothing, traditions, philosophies, family structures, holidays, stories, and ways of seeing the world. Good. Bring them. Much of what we now think of as American culture exists precisely because previous waves of immigrants brought pieces of their cultures with them.

I am therefore not arguing that somebody should step off an airplane, erase everything that came before, and instantly become culturally indistinguishable from someone whose family has lived here for twelve generations. Keep your food, and please keep the really good food. Keep your music, language, stories, holidays, and family traditions. Build your church, synagogue, mosque, temple, shrine, or meditation center. Celebrate your heritage and teach your children where their grandparents came from.

That is the salad, and I like the salad. But a salad still needs a bowl, because without the bowl everything eventually winds up scattered across the table. The American bowl is not hamburgers, baseball, country music, Christianity, English ancestry, or whether you put pineapple on pizza. The bowl is the civic culture that makes all those differences possible in the first place.

That civic culture includes freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, equality before the law, representative government, due process, peaceful disagreement, individual liberty, religious freedom, and the idea that your neighbor possesses the same rights you claim for yourself. George Washington expressed something important about that civic vision in his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport when he described a government that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” That is much closer to what I mean when I talk about the predominant American culture worth preserving.

The Bowl Is Liberty, and I Am Not Trading It Away

Let me make something unequivocally clear. I do not want imported cultures or homegrown cultures that seek to dismantle what the American experiment has been struggling, imperfectly, to preserve for 250 years: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, equality before the law, representative government, due process, peaceful disagreement, individual liberty, religious freedom, and the principle that your neighbor possesses the same rights you claim for yourself. America has frequently failed to live up to those ideals, sometimes spectacularly, but the answer to failing to live up to an ideal is not to abandon the ideal.

So if your culture, ideology, political movement, or religion requires curtailing those freedoms in order to achieve its vision of the good society, my answer is no. That applies just as much to someone whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower as it does to someone who received a green card yesterday. This is not an immigration standard. It is a civic standard.

Christian nationalism that wants government power used to impose Christianity? No. Communism that requires revolutionary control of political and economic life? No. Theocratic imposition of Sharia on people who do not accept it? No. Neo-cameralism that wants to trade representative government for something resembling a corporation run by a sovereign CEO? No. MAGA, when loyalty to a leader or movement is placed above constitutional restraints and individual liberty? No. Left-wing activism that rejects open debate, treats disagreement itself as violence, or concludes that coercion is justified whenever the cause is sufficiently righteous? No. I do not particularly care whether authoritarianism arrives carrying a cross, a red flag, a rainbow flag, an American flag, or a corporate organizational chart. If the destination is coercive conformity, I am not interested in the sales pitch.

I am not claiming that everyone who ever wore a MAGA hat secretly wants a dictatorship. That would be precisely the sort of sweeping generalization I criticize elsewhere. But there are demonstrable authoritarian currents within contemporary right-wing politics, and political scientists have studied the relationship between right-wing authoritarian attitudes and support for the MAGA agenda. If MAGA means lower taxes, fewer regulations, or a particular immigration policy, argue those things in the democratic arena. If it means the leader gets to ignore constitutional restraints because our side needs to win, then we have crossed a very different line.

“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” – John Stuart Mill

This is one reason I become frustrated with the false dilemma increasingly presented by both political extremes. We are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the other side has become so dangerous that our only choice is to empower “our” authoritarians before “their” authoritarians seize control. The far left points toward the far right and says, “See, you need us to stop them.” The far right points toward the far left and says exactly the same thing. Somehow both sales pitches end with the same curious request: give our side more power and trust us to use it responsibly.

No thanks. I do not have to choose between two varieties of authoritarianism simply because each insists the other is worse. That is a false dilemma, meaning that two alternatives are presented as though they exhaust the available choices when other alternatives remain. There is another choice sitting right in front of us: constitutional government, divided powers, civil liberties, political pluralism, and a culture in which losing an election does not mean losing your fundamental rights.

Now, someone will reasonably object that all government is coercive to some extent, and I agree. I learned that on day one of government class. Laws ultimately carry sanctions, taxes are not voluntary donations, courts issue orders, and police exist because sometimes somebody refuses to comply. The question therefore cannot be whether government ever uses coercion. The question is how much coercion is legitimate, for what purposes, under what restraints, with what due process, and subject to what checks on power?  A balancing act for sure.

That is the perennial tension between liberty and authority. I tend to picture it, admittedly as a simplified heuristic rather than a complete political-science model, as a spectrum. At one extreme sits anarchy, where government has essentially no authority; at the other sits totalitarianism, where government attempts to control nearly everything. Somewhere between those extremes lies the libertarian sweet spot I am interested in: enough government to protect rights, maintain order, enforce legitimate laws, defend the country, and prevent people from harming one another, but not so much government that the state becomes our parent, priest, employer, censor, therapist, and moral supervisor.

John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle is useful here. In simplified form, liberty should generally be restricted when our actions cause genuine harm to others, not merely because other people dislike our choices. Obviously, defining harm gets complicated, and God knows we are now arguing about whether offensive words, uncomfortable ideas, or disagreement itself constitute harm. Words can certainly wound, threaten, deceive, defame, intimidate, and even facilitate crimes, which is why the law has always recognized some narrow categories of unprotected speech. But if we expand “harm” until merely hearing an idea we despise becomes equivalent to violence, freedom of speech becomes almost meaningless. Whoever gets to define emotional discomfort as actionable harm suddenly possesses an extraordinarily powerful censorship tool.

That is why I do not think democratic republics are inherently the problem. If anything, our present trouble may come partly from forgetting what makes them work. A constitutional republic requires people who are willing to lose elections, tolerate speech they hate, defend rights for people they dislike, compromise without surrendering principle, and accept that political opponents remain fellow citizens rather than enemies to be eradicated. When those habits disappear, authoritarian solutions start looking attractive because authoritarianism promises to make all those irritating disagreements disappear. Of course it does. So does a prison.

A golden cage may be comfortable, orderly, and even luxurious, but it remains a prison if you are not free to leave. The authoritarian left may promise economic equality, the authoritarian right may promise order and national restoration, the theocrat may promise moral righteousness, and the technocrat may promise efficiency. History should make us extremely cautious whenever anybody offers to solve human disorder by concentrating enough power in the hands of the correct ruling class.

Europe has tried ruling classes. Russia tried revolutionary rulers who promised liberation from the old ruling class and produced another one. China did the same. Human beings have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to overthrow one hierarchy only to discover that the new people sitting in the big chairs rather enjoy sitting there.  All at the little guys expense.

I would rather stay with the messy middle. Give me constitutional restraints, divided government, elections, due process, obnoxious speech, religious disagreement, protests I do not like, newspapers that irritate me, politicians I vote against, and neighbors who live in ways I would never choose for myself. That arrangement can be maddening, but at least it leaves room for all of us to breathe.

That, to me, is the bowl holding the American salad together. Change the ingredients, add new ones, argue about the recipe, and occasionally pick out something that has gone rotten. But do not smash the bowl because someone on television convinced you that only an authoritarian strongman, revolutionary vanguard, religious establishment, or ideological purity committee can save us from the people on the other side.

We do not need to trade one ruling class for another. We need to defend the freedom that keeps any ruling class from owning us in the first place.

Leave the Suck at Home

Here is where I need to refine the original thought that started this rant. It would be too simplistic to say that if someone leaves a poor, violent, or dysfunctional country, their culture must be the reason the country failed. Nations fall into misery for all kinds of reasons, including war, corruption, colonial history, economic policy, dictatorship, organized crime, geography, resource scarcity, ethnic conflict, foreign intervention, and sometimes plain bad luck. People also migrate for complicated reasons involving family, employment, education, persecution, war, safety, or simply the hope of something better.

So no, leaving a country does not mean that everything about the culture you came from sucks. That would be an absurd generalization, and most cultures contain things that are beautiful, admirable, and worth preserving alongside things that deserve criticism. We should be capable of making distinctions rather than throwing entire peoples or traditions into one intellectual trash can.

But I still stand by the spirit of the original rant. If part of what made the place you left miserable was authoritarianism, sectarian violence, religious coercion, corruption, censorship, political intimidation, caste hierarchy, suppression of women, forced marriage, persecution of minorities, or the belief that people who disagree with you should be silenced, punished, or driven out, then please do not recreate that here. Leave that part at home.

And before somebody misunderstands me, the exact same rule applies to people whose families have lived in America for three hundred years. Being native-born does not give anyone a special permit to become an authoritarian jackass. If you were born in Kansas and think government should crush everyone who disagrees with you, I have the same problem with you. If you were born in California and think people should lose fundamental rights because they hold political opinions you hate, same objection. If you immigrated yesterday and think religious law should be imposed on your neighbor against his will, same objection.

The standard is not ethnicity, ancestry, race, religion, or birthplace. The standard is liberty. You are free to live according to your beliefs, but the price of that freedom is acknowledging that your neighbor possesses the same freedom to live according to beliefs you may think are completely wrong.

Multiculturalism Cannot Mean Moral Surrender

This is where the philosophical problem becomes interesting. Imagine Culture A says, “Everyone may practice his own religion,” while Culture B says, “Everyone must practice my religion.” We cannot simply declare both positions equally compatible with multiculturalism because one of them destroys the conditions that allow multiculturalism to exist. One permits disagreement; the other abolishes it.

Karl Popper famously described something similar as the paradox of tolerance, the problem created when an open society tolerates movements that intend to destroy the openness of the society itself. His point was not that we should suppress every unpleasant idea. It was that tolerance cannot reasonably require us to stand helplessly by while genuinely intolerant movements use our freedoms as tools for eliminating those same freedoms.

That principle applies to cultural conflict as well. We can tolerate enormous differences in food, language, theology, clothing, family traditions, art, philosophy, and lifestyle because those differences do not necessarily prevent somebody else from living according to his or her conscience. Coercion is different because coercion does not merely ask for space in the salad bowl. It demands control of the bowl.

You may believe women should dress modestly, and you are free to teach that belief within your own family or religious community. You may not therefore force my wife to dress according to your beliefs. You may believe alcohol is immoral and abstain from it completely, but you do not automatically acquire the authority to dictate what everyone else may drink. You may believe Christianity is true, as I do, but that does not give me permission to force my atheist neighbor into church. Likewise, my atheist neighbor’s disbelief does not give him permission to prohibit me from going.

That reciprocity may be one of the most important principles in a pluralistic society. Freedom means I get to be wrong in your eyes, and you get to be wrong in mine. We can argue, persuade, preach, debate, criticize, and attempt to change each other’s minds, but the line is crossed when disagreement becomes coercion.

Integration Is Not Erasure

This is also why I prefer the language of integration to the harshest versions of assimilation. Assimilation sometimes carries the implication that immigrants must become culturally indistinguishable from everyone else, but American history does not really work that way. German Americans changed America, Irish Americans changed America, Italian Americans changed America, Jewish Americans changed America, Mexican Americans changed America, and more recent immigrants continue changing America.

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.” – Karl Popper

At the same time, America changes the people who arrive here. Their children grow up surrounded by American institutions, American schools, American media, American political assumptions, and neighbors who come from entirely different backgrounds. Over generations, identities mix and overlap until something that once seemed foreign becomes so thoroughly American that people eventually forget where it came from.

That process is healthy so long as the civic foundation remains strong. I am not terribly worried because somebody’s grandmother makes tamales and speaks Spanish at home, because that is not a threat to liberal democracy. In fact, if Grandma is making tamales, please send me the address because I am willing to conduct further research.

What concerns me much more is whether we still share enough of a civic culture to disagree without trying to destroy one another. A diverse society can survive tremendous disagreement if people agree on the rules governing disagreement. It becomes unstable when groups begin believing that victory entitles them to strip their opponents of the freedoms they themselves demanded while out of power.

What Are People Running Toward?

There is one final observation from that conversation in the car. Watch where people try to go. Migration is enormously complicated, so I do not want to reduce millions of individual decisions to a single explanation, but people repeatedly take enormous risks to reach places such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and countries in Western Europe. Meanwhile, some authoritarian governments work remarkably hard to stop people from leaving.

People sometimes vote with their feet, and that should make us curious. It does not prove America is perfect, because God knows it is not. It does not prove every American institution is healthy or every cultural habit should be preserved forever. But it should cause us to ask what people are running toward.

Economic opportunity is certainly part of the answer, and safety and political stability matter tremendously. Freedom matters too. Emma Lazarus captured something of that aspiration in the words associated with the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I like that image because it describes something more profound than simply changing geographic location. It is the hope that somewhere a person might finally be allowed to breathe.

But notice the final word: free. That freedom has to belong to the person standing next to you too. It cannot mean freedom for my tribe, my religion, my political faction, or my preferred way of life while everybody else is compelled to conform.

Bring the Good Stuff

So perhaps this is where my rant finally lands. I do not want America to become culturally homogeneous because that sounds horribly boring. I like the salad. I want to encounter different foods, traditions, music, religious ideas, philosophies, languages, and ways of seeing the world. I want my assumptions challenged, and I want immigrants to contribute things America did not have before they arrived.

At the same time, I want us to remember what the bowl is made of. If you come here because you want a better life, welcome. Bring your family, recipes, music, faith, stories, traditions, and the things your grandparents taught you. Teach me something I did not know, and perhaps bring something this country badly needs.

But whether you arrived yesterday or your ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, leave authoritarianism behind. Leave coercion behind, along with the idea that government exists to make everybody live exactly as you would live. Leave behind the belief that disagreement is treason or that your neighbor’s freedom ends wherever your discomfort begins.

Bring the good stuff with you, because America has always been changed by the people who came here. Just do all of us one favor and leave the suck at home.

References

• Democratic Socialists of America. (n.d.). About us. https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/
• Hassan, S. (2018). Combating cult mind control: The #1 best-selling guide to protection, rescue, and recovery from destructive cults (4th ed., 30th anniversary ed.). Freedom of Mind
• Human Rights Watch. (2026). World report 2026: North Korea. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/north-korea
• Mill, J. S. (1859). On liberty. John W. Parker and Son. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2015). The integration of immigrants into American society. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/21746
• Popper, K. R. (1966). The open society and its enemies: Vol. 1. The spell of Plato (5th ed., rev.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945). . Civitas Institute
• Revolutionary Communists of America. (n.d.). A fighting program for the Revolutionary Communists of America. https://communistusa.org/program/
• Washington, G. (1790, August 18). To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island [Letter]. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
• Wolf, K., Kim, C., Brisbane, L., & Junn, J. (2025). Support for the MAGA agenda: Race, gender, and authoritarianism. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 10(S1), 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2025.21

Excerpt

America’s strength is cultural diversity held together by a shared commitment to liberty. Whether an ideology is imported or homegrown, left or right, religious or secular, it should be rejected when it seeks to curtail freedom of conscience, speech, due process, equality, or individual rights.

There are no wise few.