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Notes -
First of all I think us vs them is not some kind of inevitability or natural default state. It’s occasionally a helpful heuristic but also many times a harmful one. After all, you can slice any group any number of ways - granted, immigrants might have some notable clusters but I think viewing everything is an ethnic conflict lens is largely just an intellectual trap (for liberals and conservatives alike, horseshoe style).
Other than that, speaking about an “erosion of common culture” is ahistorical and a weird framing. Culture doesn’t have some kind of entropic principle where the inevitable state is chaos, disorder, and decay. Culture changes, and just like people it changes on its own even in the absence of other influences, due to the ever-present pressures of time and history. I think part of your misconception here too is that every cultural topic and belief is a binary scale. No! Ideas and concepts and practices merge and change and contort and remix in any number of degrees. It’s not like every single issue has a slider. Historians apply sliders as a post hoc analysis tool, but it is a grave error to see only the tool and take it at face value. The same thing happens in statistical modeling - just because a linear model works well doesn’t mean you can jump right to causal inference (imperfect analogy but idea of tools not necessarily representing the whole picture is still important).
Another part of your error seems to be an undercurrent of idealization. Like you mention ideas about God as clashing but the history of ideas about God even within ‘classic America’ have been anything but stable. Even the role of religion in America has fluctuated wildly, even in times without major immigration pressure. I’m not saying immigration has zero effect, but I am saying that more humility is needed. I see so many people make not only claims of outright cultural superiority, which I think is oversimplified but I don’t care too much about, but claims that they can somehow predict the exact way that a culture will mesh and change with another. No! Absolutely not! We can’t predict these things well, we’re not Hari Seldon. The beautiful and interesting and unpredictable change and melding of cultures and ideas and events doesn’t work on those simple levels, especially in the medium time scales we often discuss, especially here.
As an example, it might well be that despite seeming “incompatibility”, Islamic beliefs end up boosting general American church attendance even among Christians because the attitudes mix in a new and unpredictable way, rather than lead to some massive sectarian civil war, creating a third Great Awakening or something.
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