Potemkin wrote:It seems to have happened from the 18th century onwards, and was reinforced by the successive waves of mass immigration and the expansion of the Frontier in the mid-19th century. America offered a golden opportunity for people from all over the world (but principally from Europe) to reinvent themselves. The immigrants came from places like Ireland, where they were oppressed and starved by their English masters, or from Scotland, where the local landowners had thrown the crofters off the land they farmed and replaced them with sheep, or from squalid Eastern European ghettos. America gave them the chance to forget who they were and where they came from, and to reinvent themselves as homesteaders or prosperous burghers. They seized that chance, but they ultimately paid a very high price for it - cultural and historical amnesia, and the idiocy which goes with such amnesia.
Rather like modern Europe? Lol. 
I'm trying to get at the root of the differences between American political culture and social attitudes and those of the rest of the world, especially Europe (which provided the cultural foundation for American society).
This is where an artificial ethnic identity takes root Potemkin. They (German, Irish, Scottish, etc.) immigrants no longer live in those lands, societies, etc. They are cut off from that. They do reinvent themselves and in order to do so they shake off their ethnic identities.
Let us look at an example (a typical arrival from Ellis Island from Germany), his ethnic name may be Johannes Kaiser, and he changes it to become more Anglo, "Mr. John King". He no longer speaks German in his home to his children and he deliberately forgets 'his native tongue' to fit in with the mainstream society he tries to emulate. In so doing? He adopts a culture that is far from homogenous and rooted in history. He adopts some nebulous Americana persona that has nothing to do with original regional German culture.
This becomes necessary to assimilate. This is different than acculturating Potemkin. Acculturation would be Johannes Kaiser continuing to speak German and learning English, choosing to speak German at home and maintain traditions and also to understand the Anglo paradigm presented as American culture. Even that is subject to loss in one or two generations without access to German culture and land.
With Mexicans that is totally different. They are neighbors, so they are there always refreshing the original culture because they are next door. The German guy can't go back to Germany or have German relatives coming over to stay months or years and socializing with his family. Too far, too inconvenient. Plus they have land that is very different from his roots. Mexicans? totally different circumstances. Enormous nation of about 130 million soon. And they have enormous amounts of Indian communities who still speak the original languages like Zapotec, Tarascan, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and many more. So? Their assimilation is a lot slower and always will be.
You see it in this state of Colorado. The original three languages the Colorado constitution was written in German, English and Spanish. German is a goners. No one speaks fluent German. Spanish? On the rise. English is the dominant one still. But Spanish on the rise? Why? Not because of the Chicanos in Colorado who have been here for centuries it is because the Mexicans and others are always coming here and arriving renewing that community with their economic activity, labor and so on. They live close by. Not so with Germany. It never will be that way with nations thousands upon thousands of miles away and with oceans dividing them. Plus? Germany, Scotland, England and Wales, are all not in a desperate financial situation like in the past that had to have poor desperate masses fleeing. That is gone. The only ones who are able and willing to come here and work hard for low wages are the ones to the South close by. Not the Europeans. Those who fail to understand this are foolish in the extreme.
- By late