> unlikely, given that the U.S. has been among the per-capita richest countries in the world for almost its entire existence
Sure, but currently the wealth of the US depends on maintaining the world's reserve currency. As I said, the reliance on international interdependence could be untangled, but it would require a team of surgeons rather than a gang of butchers. The gang of butchers will merely destroy what we do have, leaving us with a broken society.
As far as the general argument about culture, I was using an example somewhere in the realm of what you were talking about to demonstrate how foreign cultures don't automatically inject themselves into US culture. You're straight up ignoring the many hurdles between being a college student and becoming a member of the "US elite".
I will also point out (and I generally hate arguments that start this way, but you dredged up the context), that WASP culture was most certainly not the only culture in the US at the time. So the appeal wasn't to the "American public at large" but rather to the subset that "mattered" to swing votes - the idea of some singular overarching culture was an illusion promulgated by broadcast mass media, and that illusion has now been shattered. That sea change has certainly upset a lot of people, but you can't claim it resulted from something as simple as student visas.
>Sure, but currently the wealth of the US depends on maintaining the world's reserve currency.
Where does this bizarre belief come from?
I'm not saying that the US does not benefit from the fact that business all over the world is denominated in US dollars, but that is a far cry from the assertion that US wealth depends on that fact: the US is wealthy for many reasons in addition to that fact.
It seems more likely to me that the fact that the US was so rich and continues to be so rich caused businesspeople all over the world to choose to do their transaction in US dollars.
In general, among the countries of the world, the US is among the least dependent on other countries for its continued economic prosperity. (Other relatively independent countries are Argentina, France and most of SE Asia. Countries highly dependent on other countries for their continued economic prosperity include China, Germany and most of the third world.)
Our current level of wealth straightforwardly depends on that fact, because we're currently trading devalueable IOUs for lots of real physical goods. The bizarre belief is the political talking point of taking those physical goods for granted (or even as a liability!) rather than bonus wealth.
Furthermore, the current state of our economy is that most everything depends on imports. Dedollarization would mean those things shoot up in price, with no readily-available domestic substitutes. And if you think we're going to set up domestic factories, where does that equipment come from? Sure we can start rubbing three flattish surfaces together, or let the price of already-existing machine tools shoot up to the point that only factories making more machine tools can afford them, but that does not happen overnight.
Maybe losing that first part is inevitable. And as I've said, it's certainly possible to untangle that second bit while avoiding collapse. It just requires the subtlety of a targeted approach - not blunt force butchering that doesn't do even the first step to analyze the situation. If the economic neoliberalism of the past thirty years is a steamroller that went over our industrial base, the Trumpist/destructionist answer is to simplistically put it in reverse.