Immigration has always been a transaction between peoples who are not identical. Thomas Sowell's long examination of migrations shows that success or failure rarely turns on the simple fact of movement. It turns on what the movers bring with them,habits of work, attitudes toward time and authority, skills that transfer, and values that either mesh with or grind against the society that receives them. Some groups arrive poor and become engines of prosperity within a generation. Others arrive and remain, in important respects, foreign for decades. The difference is not mystery or malice. It is culture, and culture does not dissolve on contact with a new passport.
Western governments have spent recent decades treating this reality as optional. Official rhetoric insists that numbers are always a net benefit, that any cultural distance can be bridged by goodwill and programs, and that questioning the scale or composition of inflows is evidence of base prejudice. Ordinary people who lock their own front doors understand the flaw in that logic. A nation is not a boarding house with infinite rooms and no house rules. It is a particular society with particular expectations about language, law, reciprocity, and the boundaries of the public square. When those expectations are treated as negotiable for newcomers while remaining binding on natives, the social contract frays.
Sowell's historical cases make the point without sentimentality. Groups that carried portable human capital, technical skills, commercial networks, literacy, or a strong internal ethic of deferred gratification, tended to raise the productivity of the places they entered. Groups that arrived with different priorities sometimes did the opposite. The lesson is not that one people is superior in some absolute sense. It is that cultural capital is real, unevenly distributed, and slow to change. Policymakers who ignore it do not abolish difference; they merely ensure that the costs of difference fall on the communities least equipped to absorb them.
The practical limits follow directly. Volume matters. A society can integrate a modest number of people who arrive ready to adapt. It cannot integrate unlimited numbers who arrive expecting the host culture to adapt to them. Selection matters. Skills, language capacity, and willingness to accept the constitutional and civic order of the receiving country are not optional extras; they are the difference between addition and subtraction. Compatibility matters. Cultures that treat religious law as superior to the secular law of the land, or that socialise large cohorts of young men into patterns of low trust and high grievance, create friction that no amount of official multiculturalism can erase. Europe's experience with certain migration streams over the past three decades supplies the evidence that abstract openness does not automatically produce concrete harmony.
None of this requires closing the door to genuine refugees or skilled workers who strengthen the country. It requires restoring the elementary right of a political community to decide the terms of membership. Nations that lose the ability or the will to make that decision eventually lose the coherence that made them attractive destinations in the first place. The alternative: treating borders as moral inconveniences and culture as a neutral backdrop, produces parallel societies, strained public services, eroded trust, and a politics of resentment on all sides. History does not reward societies that pretend human differences are only skin deep when the differences that actually shape outcomes run far deeper.
The sober conclusion is the one Sowell has repeated for decades: migration is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its results depend on who comes, how many come, and what they carry. A serious immigration policy starts from that fact rather than from the comforting fiction that culture is infinitely plastic and that every arrival is an identical unit of economic gain. Countries that remember this keep the capacity to welcome those who will reinforce their strengths. Countries that forget it eventually discover that the door they refused to manage has been used to change the house itself.
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/06/16/on-migration-and-culture/