True, but the waves were filtered by several hurdles: We did not absorb the lame, diseased, mentally ill or subnormal; we also did not, as a rule, get many who were not motivated to find or create better for themselves.
Had we somehow moved, say, the dispossessed of England wholesale to New England, many or most of them would have remained dispossessed and incapable.
Actually, that’s essential what we did with the Scots highlanders… And they did fine. The difference was that until about what, 1880, there was always the frontier and free farmland if the factory conditions became too English.
The convenience for the south was that slaves were adapted to the climate; they were easily identifiable and could not take advantage of an escape to the frontier and farm ownership.
I’m not familiar enough with the events you’re talking about, but this would seem to be a much smaller scale instance, with a smaller overall impact, than the larger discussion here covers.
Is moving a modest number of individuals of one British Isles culture to another BI culture as significant as moving the same number of individuals across the ocean to a different land and culture? It wouldn’t seem so.
And when you say they “did fine,” did that include the lesser members of the culture - the old, the sick and infirm, the ‘damaged’? My point was that those individuals rarely (close to never) emigrated, so immigration to the US became a fairly selective process favoring the young, the reasonably healthy, the educated and/or labor-capable, and the adaptable. “The cowards never started and the weaklings died along the way,” in harsh terms… but the result was a filtered, superior stock rather than whole villages mired in collective inability and social baggage.