People over Place: Reviewing “The Culture Transplant” by Garett Jones

“Any serious government would, therefore, develop and implement immigration policy with the utmost care. Instead, our governments are experimenting with unprecedented peacetime increases in immigration that further expand ethnic and cultural diversity.”

In a previous piece at Merion West on immigration to the United States, I paraphrased Christopher Caldwell to ask if the United States can stay the same with different people in it. The vital question of what a nation is—and how it sees itself—relates to what our collective futures will be in the nations of the Anglosphere. This demands insightful analysis and careful argumentation from those who know what they are talking about.

Fortunately, we have precisely that mix of virtues in Garett Jones’ book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, which was released with Stanford University Press in 2022. With this book, Jones brings the heavy artillery of statistical analysis and knowledge of the literature to bombard the opposition with evidence that immigration has a deep effect on our economies and cultures and that this effect persists down the generations. Any serious government would, therefore, develop and implement immigration policy with the utmost care. Instead, our governments are experimenting with unprecedented peacetime increases in immigration that further expand ethnic and cultural diversity.

The book’s provocative thesis is: “Immigration, to a large degree, creates a culture transplant, making the places that migrants go a lot like the places they left. And for good and for ill, those culture transplants shape a nation’s future prosperity.” Bolstering the thesis is the evidence Jones assembles to support his argument. He presents the facts in a straightforward manner. He explains in plain language the complexities of economic research and the workings of the “deep roots” literature that together provide the ammunition for his argument.

People Matter More Than Place

Drawing upon the research of Columbia University’s Xavier Sala-i-Martin to buttress his own contention that cultural factors are central to whether various economic systems succeed or fail, Jones points to the last 500 years of European expansion on a global scale. And guess what? “A lot of what people think of as just ‘the power of geography’ isn’t that at all—it’s really culture in disguise. How can I be so sure? Because particularly over the last five centuries, since the great age of European exploration and conquest, people have moved. They’ve moved in their millions from one country to another, sometimes voluntarily, all too often not. And when they moved, they almost never fully assimilated.” The places Europeans moved to—taking their culture, beliefs and ideas with them—became more like the places they left. We see this in their economic performance.