I have often argued that cultural group selection through migration and assimilation favors Lockean liberal regimes. Human beings "vote with their feet" in that they tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, and more just societies. And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice. Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.
This explains why John Locke argued for England having a policy of open borders and general naturalization of immigrants. Some people objected to Locke's position by claiming that immigrants would not be assimilated into English society. Locke responded by saying that once immigrants are naturalized,
they are then in interest as much our own people as any. The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him. For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners (1997, 325).
If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English and thus become "perfect Englishmen." After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.
Evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008). This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction.
Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity. And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).
Here Wade repeats one of the primary arguments made by nationalist conservatives like Yoram Hazony and J.D. Vance for why immigration needs to be severely restricted.
But where's the evidence that most immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and therefore threaten social cohesion? Wade's only evidence for this is a study by Robert Putnam (2007). Putnam wanted to study how the cultural diversity in the United States caused by immigration might affect "social capital" (defined as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness). He collected survey data from interviews of people living in 41 very different communities ranging from large cities like Los Angeles and Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington, and rural South Dakota. People were asked "Do you trust the people in your neighborhood?" He found that people living in ethnically homogeneous communities (like Lewiston, Maine) were more trusting of their neighbors than were people living in ethnically heterogeneous communities (like San Francisco). He also found that people in ethnically diverse communities were less likely to volunteer to work on community projects than were people in ethnically homogeneous communities.
Putnam summarized his conclusions in a passage quoted by Wade:
Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. . . . Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us (Putnam 2007:150-151; Wade 2025:174).
But notice Putnam's qualification suggested by the phrase "at least in the short run." In fact, much of Putnam's paper is devoted to arguing that in the long run, "successful immigrant societies have overcome . . . fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities" (137).
Wade casually dismisses this side of Putnam's argument: "Though Putnam expressed the hope that in the long run the negative effects of diversity would disappear, his work provided a frank and rare description of the formidable problems raised by immigration" (174). But Putnam didn't just express the "hope" that this could be done, because he surveyed some of the evidence from the history of American immigration during the period of almost open borders--from around 1820 to around 1920--that showed immigrants assimilating into American society. Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and others were integrated into an American society that had once been a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)-dominated society. In the short run, the first generation of immigrants tended to "hunker down" in their own cultural enclaves, set apart from the dominant American culture. But in the long run, the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants assimilated into American culture or into a new more expansive American identity that could include Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and other hyphenated Americans.
Wade concedes that the many European immigrants--Irish, German, Southern, and Eastern Europeans--who arrived in America before World War I "assimilated, at least by the second generation, to their new community," and consequently there was "a high degree of cohesion" (179, 209). "But cohesion has ebbed significantly over the last half century," Wade claims. "Rising and more visible gaps in wealth, high fluxes of immigration with poor assimilation, and the advent of identity politics have stretched and torn the social fabric" (209). Wade thus implies that over the past fifty years, the children of immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture as they did a hundred years ago.
But Wade offers no evidence for this claim. And in fact, there is lots of evidence against it. For example, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022, 2024) have used historical US Census data to show that the socioeconomic assimilation of immigrants through upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century. In the late 19th and early 20th century, sons born to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution (the income level below which 25 percent of individuals earn) rose to the 40th percentile as adults on average. Most children of immigrants performed much better as adult earners--with children of immigrant Portuguese or Italian parents reaching the 60th percentile as adults. A hundred years later, we see the same pattern. Sons (or daughters) born in 1980 to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution reach just above the 45th percentile (for sons) and 40th percentile (for daughters) as adults. Children of immigrant parents do better than this. Children of parents from Hong Kong, China, and India reach, on average, almost the 65th percentile as adults. The second-generation of immigrants continue to assimilate into the American middle-class culture.
The most radical form of assimilation of immigrants is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries (Drouhot and Nee 2019:181). Intermarriage rates--immigrants marrying native Americans with different ethnic, racial, and religious identities--have been rising steadily since the 1980s in the United States. Few Americans today remember the days in the 1950s when young men and women were expected to marry within their ethnic, racial, and religious groups.
Previously, I have written about the importance of assimilation through intermarriage for the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization that has made America a multiethnic nation--or what Frederick Douglass called "the composite nation."
In his earlier book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--Wade argued that while "races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. . . . the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).
But now there's another question at issue here: what exactly is motivating these immigrants to undertake the extraordinary sacrifices that come with their efforts to immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the European nation-states? Wade's answer is that they are attracted by "Western culture," which can be a "common culture" for "people of all ethnicities and cultures" (210). But he doesn't specify the meaning of that "Western culture" that attracts so many immigrants.
Wade does point, however, to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the "inclusive institutions" achieved first in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688--overturning the "extractive institutions" of the oppressive regimes that had dominated human history for so long--as the highest development of Western culture (Wade 2014:148, 193-196; Wade 2025:98-100). Those "inclusive institutions"--impartial rule of law, property rights, personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and limited government--sound like Lockean liberalism to me.
So when immigrants "vote with their feet" for Western culture, they're voting for the Lockean liberal social order. That's what I would identify as evolutionary group selection for freedom through migration and assimilation.
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