The U.S had racist immigration policies for about the
first 350 years. It restricted immigration to mainly
white europeans.
This isn’t accurate. We imported large numbers of Africans until 1808 and allowed unrestricted immigration of Chinese and Japanese into the late 19th century. Even the “white Europeans” restrictions of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts really meant “north and western Europeans.” It isn’t clear that America was weaker for allowing non-white immigration.
The examples of the astonishing and wonderful things that America has done were not because we were white, but because we had a relatively laissez-faire system that rewarded invention–including inventions by some pretty astonishing black guys that you probably don’t even know about, like the inventor of the stoplight and the gas mask, Garrett Morgan.
