I believe you are paraphrasing Milton Friedman there. I had to look it up; I thought at first it was Alan Greenspan. Definitely not Joe Stiglitz! 
No, wait, found a sort of reference to Krugman saying something similar:
Well, it was facile if not sophistic when Friedman said it, and I’m not giving Paul Krugman a pass on it. Because it’s not all-or-nothing, and not an automatic trade-off. The USA does not at this time have open borders, at all. The USA isn’t more beset by present migration than France (an EU member, with former colonies, etc.). And the USA has much less of a welfare state than France. And France is extremely social-democratic, while the USA is the opposite of that.
If you want to say that our active solicitation of European migrants over a century ago means that none of us can have social democracy now, well, that’s historically hilarious. Because a century ago the line was that all that “red” stuff–socialism, anarchism, communism–came from “brown” Europeans, and was alien to our “unified” Anglo-Saxon culture.
The USA lacks social democracy not because we have some cultural inability to be unified, but because we put the wrong people in charge, and have done so for too long.
I think you may be missing my point: After they came to the US, they were installed in the"white protestant" layer of society. The layer of society occupied by blacks 150 years ago was closed to them. So was the Chinese immigrants level, the Latinos, Irish, Italian etc. In effect Scandinavian immigrants had a very high ethnic floor.
Over time, it may really have acted similar to being a sort of lesser aristocracy, or caste thing. No matter what you did, you would remain white.
And of course, you’ve selected away anyone with enough turbulence in their family history to not know where their ancestors came from 150 years ago. So you’ve mostly people that have enjoyed a cumulative advantage compared to less advantaged sections of society for that amount of time.
I don’t think you are getting this. Society in Sweden has different layers than in the US.
When people emigrated to the US, they arrived in an ethnically stratified society, where they were slotted into or close to the top ethnic layer. And those families have enjoyed the advantages of this for 150 years. That is why they do better than* the average of every layer* in Swedish society.
If you want to compare to a similar layer in Swedish society, you’d need to take out everyone who can’t follow their families back 150 years in Sweden, everyone whose not a protestant, all the Finns, Norwegians, Saami, and Taters. And then you’d have to simulate the effect of being in a top ethnic group in the US for many generations.
In fact, the Swedish Aristocracy may be a the best comparison group.
France’s immigration is more generous than most, but they still regulate it better than we do. Most of their immigrants are from Europe and they too prefer high skill immigrants. WE do too as a matter of policy, but we are the only nation in the world that just basically ignores our own immigration policy and imports mostly low skill labor.
The only way that can “work” with a social democracy is to let them pay taxes but not give them benefits, which is what we do.
This is ridiculous. There was no upper layer of society they were slotted in. They arrived and took jobs as factory workers, farmers, or servants. The reasons their descendants make more than people in Sweden do is that they were able to take advantage of the superior American system and not get stuck in the inferior Swedish system.
I don’t find that a convincing or realistic argument. I think your perspective only encompasses white America. The immigrants took jobs as factory workers, owned farms, worked as craftsmen or traders. How many of these things were realistically open to black people at the time? Chinese ? Native Americans ? Latinos ?
Lots of farmland owned by these groups 150 years ago ?
In effect, having these professions open to them -in addition to things like lawyer, doctor, manager, etc- put them in a high ethnic strata.
The society of America consists of a number of ethnic layers that has historically had very different restrictions. You’ve basically taken one group that has been slotted into the level with the least restrictions and the most advantages, left to boil for 150 years, then eliminated everyone that hasn’t done at least well enough to have 150 years of their family history clear. And then compared it to the average of every layer of Swedens society.
This is not how you do even comparisons. To put it very mildly indeed.
When are you talking about? Not post-2008, surely. Much of the country has already shed its Mexican and Central American immigrants.
Are you convinced that
a) the SoCal caste system is that big a part of the USA economy?
b) that the “Mexicans” who work menial jobs in SoCal aren’t already citizens?
In any case, it’s a little silly to complain about blue-collar jobs going to immigrants when there are multiple other causes of the loss of middle-income jobs, and immigration may be one of the hardest variables to control.
Some manufacturing has been offshored to entire other countries. Clem may have lost a roofing job to a Meskin, but ten of his kin lost their jobs when the plant moved to Vietnam. Weaken the dollar and you fix some of this.
Consolidation and merger (since Reagan) wiped out a lot of regional employers. Anti-trust law might have saved careers.
The post-Reagan tax profile (very little tax on capital and capital gains, rising taxes on wages and consumption) tends to consolidate wealth. Eventually the middle-income and down consumers stop buying as much, and businesses disappear in a spiral of demand failure. Cutting sales and payroll taxes while raising top marginal income taxes to ~60% (and adjusting the capital gains tax code to have less of a free ride for stock speculators) would boost the economy.
But you will not stop people from crossing a border if there’s ever a profit in it again.
Fortunately for the nativists, the USA’s economy is in the hands of conservatives, and they have the chance now to make sure it is never recovered from them. And many conservatives only pretend to pursue economic growth. There never will be a strong employment market here again, so there never will be the sort of immigration we saw in the late 20th Century again. You can wall yourselves in like North Korea, and the walls will, like the North Koreans’, largely serve to keep your own people in.
The comparison is between swedish americans and swedes. So you think that swedish americans were not able to fall into the bottom rung of society because of some racial classification system that only allowed japanese, indians, hispanics, and blacks into the bottom rung of society?
It is true that certain segments were not allowed to rise to the top but it is not true at all that people were not allowed to fall into the lower class because of racial solidarity. This is illustrated by looking at the other groups you mentioned, who does better japanese americans or japanese, black americans or africans, hispanic americans or central and south americans?