Thread by @Mssr_le_Baron

I've done other immigration waves before, steadily working back, but I've yet to talk about the first one. So let's talk about it. How did Massachusetts stop being the theocratic Bay Colony? What happened to Puritan society?

The first great immigration.

Before the great mass of Irish, Scots, and Scots-Irish arrived, Huguenot refugees came to Massachusetts. Their wealth, industriousness, and religious alignment made them fit in well, and gave the Puritans a high opinion of immigrants.

The descendants of the Huguenots would leave a lasting legacy in New England, being visibly and notably overrepresented in both the colonial elite *and the 20th century WASP Establishment*.

Their presence warmed the Puritans to immigrants. Enter the Celt.

John Winthrop: "Without immigrants, who will do our laundry and cook our food?"

A perennial debate. Restrictionists like Cotton Mather debated immigrationists like Winthrop and the Puritan commercial elite, who wanted more White men to do work and settle the frontier.

Fundamentally, the attitude of many Puritans was, being gentlemen, why should they have to do their own menial labor? Is this really a lordly lifestyle if we have to wash our own black robes? Both Puritan and Cavalier carried a haughtiness from their Norman ancestors.

Cotton Mather disagreed. Cotton wanted his fellow Puritans to do their own damn laundry. He thought this influx of newcomers, of strangers, would degenerate the colony with their alien culture, religion, and inferior blood. He thought poors were weeds in God's garden.

But he lost the debate. The commercial interests of the Puritans overrode their religious interests. Cotton Mather represented the dying breath of an ideal: A City on a Hill. A new Republic, by and for 130IQ Anglos of good character and godly faith.

In came the tradesmen.

People talk about a lot about the Puritans wanting to "restrict immigration to the middle class". They mention attempts at Puritan migration restriction. This is a misunderstanding that doesn't grasp the real law or its implications.

You had to post a bond of £100.

Many of you don't understand how much money that was. This was not "middle class" as modern Americans understand it. The modern middle class is closer to the tradesmen and farmers the Puritans desperately tried to keep out. I'll give you an idea.

Those indentured servants were selling for £12. A fresh slave in Colonial Virginia? £20. Being able to post a *bond* of £100 meant you had that much *lying around*. You had more free capital than probably 95% of Antebellum Southerners. That's who they wanted.

Cotton Mather and his political team wanted Massachusetts to stay a Republic for 130IQ devout Anglos. That's what freedom meant to them. The freedom of a homogenous society of elite gentry Britons. Free from the weeds in God's garden (poors, 95% of England).

And what did the new immigrants do? Sure, they did the labor Puritan boys didn't want to do. And lots of other things along with it. Drinking, murder, property crime, beating their wives. All things mostly unknown to the idyllic sealed off community of 130IQ Anglos before.

The best of them were the Scots, who most quickly assimilated into the Puritan colony, and the worst of them were the Irish. The Scots-Irish Ulstermen were somewhere inbetween.

Now, today's immigration advocates like to point to past immigration and say it all turned out okay.

They say the past immigrants assimilated. Here's the problem with that: They didn't. Instead, they changed society until it became a blended average of the old and new. What happens if you liked the old? It's never coming back. Even fellow British Islanders changed things.

The Old Bay Colony, the colony envisioned by the Puritan fathers, was a self-governing Republic of high IQ, wealthy gentlemen, who endured the harshness of colony life out of sincere religious conviction. And the new immigrants?

They made common cause with Quakers and Jacobites.

The new immigrants did not like the Puritan way of life, so they agitated until a friendly Stuart King agreed to abolish the theocracy, and then they kept going. Puritan society stopped being a small, self-governing, self-selected elite. It became more "middle class".

In time, they settled down, but the New England that came after the immigrants was less an intentional experiment and more like a normal country. Its residents more middle class. Tradesmen, not gentlemen. New England would never again be a paradise for 130IQ Anglos.

The Founding Fathers were predominately men formed from the secularizing ashes of northern and southern Colonial Elites. They were the 130IQ Anglo-Normans, the Cavalier and Puritan legacies. Jefferson and Washington had hundreds of millions of dollars of land.

America was truly a great country, and hopefully will be so again. And the early Scots-Irish immigrants came to define what America is. When we think of America, most of all, we think of Scots-Irish culture. Waving the flag, grilling, monster trucks, shooting guns, and yet...

Considering what happened, we must acknowledge that there was a phantom America that could have been. The continuation of the Norman experiment, the breeding, in perpetuity, of 130IQ Anglos in isolation. More generations like the Founding Fathers. And that's what was lost.

Perhaps it would have never been a continental and world empire. But it could have been many other things. Boston as a Singapore on the Atlantic. Who knows?

Regardless. I hope you understand that every immigration wave, even the earliest, fundamentally changed America.

More stories of immigrants *not* assimilating and instead changing everything forever.

The Ellis Islanders.

The Japanese Planters

The Kuomintang

And how the Ostjuden ended the WASP Establishment

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