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hugo7
America's history is very short. If you want more than that to boost your sense of identity, the "home country" adds some.
Also, there's the fact that it's such a varied range of origins the immigrants came from, making the American identity both broad and conformist, so having an ethnic/national identity that's more sharply defined is attractive to a lot of people.
More simply, the first generations of immigrants from place X stick together to help each other and their memory of the old home is still fresh. Even as successive generations integrate, they inherit something from the old group identity.
For all its flaws, the U.S. has more tolerance of immigrants who preserve a sense of ties to their old country than Britain does.