Another way to look at it is through the lens of nationalism. Other countries, which have formed around nations (which are groups of people with a collective id

Another way to look at it is through the lens of nationalism. Other countries, which have formed around nations (which are groups of people with a collective identity), have an inherent need to care for "their" people. Slovakia is 83.8% Slovak. Portugal is 87.8% Portuguese. Poland is 98.8% Polish. [*] America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation? [*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.