Who said anything about republicans? I’m an immigrant from a country that exists because it split off from another country due to cultural differences (even though nearly everyone in the story was a “brown” Muslim). Incidentally, ended up being a great idea because those cultural differences (tolerance for theocracy and military rule, lack of respect for government) caused the other country to kind of go off the rails later. Culture matters!

Ironically, nearly all the people immigrating to the US come from countries that believe the same thing as republicans: one cultural group has no moral obligation to invite another cultural group over the border to share democratic governance of their country with them. Indians believe that, Chinese people believe that. Japanese people, Koreans, everyone in the Middle East. Mexicans would flip out if mass immigration from Guatemala was flipping elections in their country.

In reality, American democrats and a handful of liberals in European countries are the odd ones out in elevating immigration to a moral issue. Ironically, it’s because they have the least respect for culture. Religious and cultural differences don’t matter to them because they’ll teach their culture in schools anyway.

I don't even think liberal Americans believe that. People who advocate for unrelenting immigration would probably be very upset if Russians were coming across the border (or some European, culturally conservative Christian-esque group) by the millions. I would argue those liberals are lying when they talk about what nationhood is. They believe in it, just not the one they live in.

Every now and then you can see glimpses of that. After Muslims went for George W. Bush in 2000, The New Republic of all places wrote an article accusing Grover Norquist of having ties to radical Islam because his wife is Arab: https://newrepublic.com/article/83799/norquist-radical-islam...

If Hispanics and Muslims were coming here and voting their social values instead of their economic ones you can bet the narrative would be different.

> I’m an immigrant from a country that exists because it split off from another country due to cultural differences

Dude, stop bringing up Bangladesh as context for anything and everything. What you are calling "cultural differences" in 1971, was simply called genocide because of racism by everyone else.

But you are going for the racism and genocide is A-ok, as it's just an expression of "cultural differences". You can continue with your word play in your replies again.

The actual conservative position, at least my interpretation of it, is something like, the whole point of civilization and being alive is to reach the height of human potential, build great things and make new discoveries. Cultural homogeneity and intellectual diversity are two sides of that coin. When everyone has the same basic values and assumptions in a high-trust society, it frees everyone to have the tolerance of eccentricity and the tolerance of the scariness of exploring new positions that you need in order to do anything great.

Liberals reading into this and seeing racism is itself an example of this phenomenon. They hear something like "diversity of ideas" and instantly a big red moral stop sign shows up in their head. It's an example of how when everyone has fundamentally different values, and everyone's different set of moral landmines are overlaid on the same map, it becomes basically impossible to walk through the space of ideas without stepping on one sooner or later.