"This shows what ridiculous nonsense open-border economics is. People are not interchangeable widgets. People from different cultures, faced with the same set of possibilities and payoffs, make different decisions: hence the enormous difficulties exporting political institutions across cultural gaps. More people=more transactions=more gains from trade is a ludicrously simplistic way to look at the complexities of human interactions."

This is the product of two related things from the Enlightenment. First, equality - all people are essentially the same and we are in the grip of a mania for equality (cum "equity", but cited by Nisbet as the "New Equality" some 50 years ago). Second is the presumed universalism of Enlightenment values. From these you get the blind, foolish assumption that all people will behave in accordance with Anglo-American rationalism, whether steeped in such or not. Likewise this the root failure to export the political/economic system of America during our hegemony (and the Wilsonian crusade to redeem/remake the world in our image).