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Comment by norikki | Hacker News Reader

The differences between any two Americans are going to be much smaller than the differences between two Chinese people from different regions of China, or two Indians from different regions of India. We often take for granted that Native born Americans are drastically more united culturally than people living in more conflict ridden parts of the world.

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I think you must have a pretty narrow view of "Americans" if you believe that. Do you think a Shanghaier and a Beijiger have less in common than an Ethiopian refugee in Virginia does with a Hmong in Missouri?

I think you have a very wide view of "Americans".

Or maybe just a non-racist one.

It's not necessary to compare immigrants. You could pick a white guy from rural Appalachia and a white guy from downtown New York and they would be unlikely to have anything in common except that they are both Americans.

They don't need to be immigrants. You can go with second generation families too.

If this is a criticism (not sure what it is actually), is it really fair to criticize any nation for the diversity of its immigrants?

Urban Missouri and urban Virginia are essentially identical culturally, and the rural areas of each state are very similar. I haven't been an immigrant from abroad in either state, but I'd expect the experiences of those once arrived in USA to be fairly similar as well.

Similar in some ways, different in many others. In either case, it's really not accurate to write off the level of diversity in the USA. TV and media give you a very skewed and artificial idea of uniformity in America.

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