Dear Sir/Madam

Of course the Japanese do not want mass immigration into their country, but to retain their ethnic identity, even if it means halving their population, which from an ecological, if not an economic, standpoint (see email of July 14) would be a positive development (Insular Japan Needs, but Resists, Immigration, July 24, 2003).

America is a country of immigrants and immigrant (predominantly European) culture, native Americans being a tiny minority. Thus, American views on immigration are bound to be very different to those of most other countries, which have predominantly indigenous populations and cultures.

Unlike Americans, most Japanese, Germans, or Englishmen, for example, are so not simply because their government issued them with the appropriate passport, but because their ancestors were also. A Japanese looks Japanese, a Scandinavian looks Scandinavian. In many countries, race is an important (perhaps an essential) part of most people's national identity, but because of, among other things, American influence and our horror of what the Nazis did, we are afraid to express it.

There is no such thing as "racial purity", but the mixing that has taken place in most countries occurred over centuries and was usually of racially and culturally closely related peoples, thus producing more-or-less homogenous populations.

The mixing that is now taking place as a result of mass global migrations, driven by the huge disparities in wealth and opportunity and facilitated by modern forms of transport, is of an altogether different order.

Indigenous peoples feel - with some justification - that their country belongs more to them than it does to the immigrants who have been attracted by the wealth (material and otherwise) that they and their forebears have created. 

Not in America, but in most countries, immigrants and their descendents are immediately recognisable from their racial characteristics. And it is no good insisting that it shouldn't matter, because it does. Race matters, because people naturally tend to identify with those they are manifestly most closely related to, i.e. have the most genes in common.

At the personal level, certainly once you get to know someone, race ceases to be of much importance, but in modern mass society, in which most people are strangers to each other, race naturally plays a more important role, particularly when it gives a good indication of who is and who is not an immigrant.