I’ve stayed out of the whole Japan conversation largely because I thought Derb’s narrow point about Japan was perfectly fair as far it went. Japan does maintain a high-living standard without permitting high levels of immigration. He was responding to Tamar Jacoby and, it seems to me, he was right.

But I’ve gotten so much email now about Japan and Sweden and how they get by without immigration I thought I might add something: I don’t care.

I don’t think comparisons to Japan are all that useful for anything. I didn’t think it was useful in the 1980s and 1990s when Lester Thurow, James Fallows, Edward Luttwak and others did it and I don’t think such comparisons are any more useful now.

Indeed, I think comparisons to other countries generally have only marginal or very specific utility. Anti-gun people point to countries with strict gun control laws and say “See, we can be like them.” Or they point at foreign healthcare systems, marriage laws etc and say, we can be like them.

Bocce balls.

The fact is we aren’t those countries. If, for example, you think it makes sense to force people to work 35 hours a week so they can eat clever cheese for a solid chunk of the work day, move to France. As Derb and others have commented many times, America has a culture all its own. And that means we arrange social policies based upon our own values. Some say our culture needs a break from continued high-levels of immigration, others draw the opposite conclusion. That’s a fair fight. But we ain’t Japan and we never will be.

The Japanese tolerate all sorts of things Americans wouldn’t: Teeny-tiny homes, tyrannical bosses, grossly stunted social mobility, crazy game shows, repugnant pedo-porn and grizzly comic books. The Swedes have no problem confiscating family wealth, giving outrageous sums to the welfare state, waiting on line for heart surgery or paying $40 for a six-pack of beer. Obviously, not all of these cultural facets are directly involved in a trade-off for a near total ban on immigration. But a great many of them are indirectly related. The Japanese and Swedish cultures and economies are not dynamic in the way ours are. These are homogeneous, prosperous, anti-individualist and, by my lights, unappealing societies to emulate (though not necessarily to visit). Sure, we may have more income inequality, but we also have more income mobility. Sure we have more immigration, but we also pay tiny fraction of our incomes on fresh fruit and create new business at the drop of a hat. Yes, we have fewer shared items in our common culture but our broader culture is much richer because it is derived from so many sources.

In their belief that laws always do what they’re intended to do, American liberals like to say Japan doesn’t have as much gun crime as us because they have strict gun control laws. No, they have less gun crime because they are Japanese. Some restrictionists are now doing the same. They look at the Japans and Swedens and say “look they preserve their cultural identity by shutting out immigrants.” Maybe so, but their cultural identity has no room for immigrants. Ours does.