In fanfiction it is common to see pure-blood opposition to Muggleborns as based on Muggleborns not understanding or seeking to change "wizarding culture".

In canon, this is not very present. We only just get a glimpse of it in PS, before it's never really touched on again:

JKR pretty much abandons this line in CoS and thereafter doubles down on pure-blood supremacy being an entirely racial doctrine, probably to avoid complex moral and political problems in a children's book. Far better if the villains are magic Nazis.

Nonetheless, for more adult fanfiction, the cultural angle is an interesting one. An analogy can be drawn between Muggleborns and immigration and for real life debates around cultural integration/multiculturalism to play out in wizarding society. Of course, most fanfic (being fanfic) just deploys the idea as a way to uncritically make pure-bloods 100% right so they can have Harry switch sides and then bash Dumbledore etc.

All the interesting debates are thereby avoided - including the interesting disanalogy that Muggleborns are born with magic.

But I think there is an interesting debate that could be had.

Some questions, then:

1. What is "wizarding culture" and/or "our ways", and how do Muggleborns affect it? Is the effect of Muggleborns positive or negative?

2. Is the analogy between Muggleborns and immigrants a good one? If it is, what level of involvement in wizarding society are Muggleborns entitled to?

3. Does the fact that Muggleborns are born with magic (rather than willingly seek magic out) change things? Should membership of wizarding society be determined by some "biological" criteria, or can wizards justifiably consider membership of their society to be more like that of a nation, inherited from your parents and only given to outsiders as a matter of discretion?

4. If Muggleborns are not members of wizarding society by virtue of their magic, can the Ministry still claim authority over them (e.g. in enforcing the statute of secrecy)? Can wizarding society justifiably have it both ways: claiming authority over Muggleborns, but not considering them natural and full members of their culture?

5. How do you like to see these things dealt with in fanfic?

 

1. "Wizarding Culture" in canon is nothing more than detailed knowledge about the Wizarding World. What the Ministry is, what Azkaban is, Knight Bus, The Trace and others. Somehow it took Harry many years to learn these details so perhaps Draco is right

2. It is, but the difference isn't national or racial or ethnic but purely cultural (or rather level of knowledge as I said above).

3. It does change things, which is why there was a whole campaign which claimed that muggleborns steal magic.

4. Of course, it would be justified by protecting the Statute.

5. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think it would be best if muggleborn children were taken from their muggle families and raised in the magical world. It would solve many problems.

 

1) The same as any other culture; it's the shared collective of music, arts, sports, language, traditions, etc. In this case, it's things like Quidditch, the Weird Sisters, outlandish and/or flamboyant fashions, etc, etc. In many ways, wizard society is a foreign culture that just happens to share a language and a parts of the core value system with muggle Britain.

And in that respect, muggleborns absolutely affect it, in much the same way immigrants do their host culture IRL. Which is to say, in some ways it's a positive and in others it's a negative, though which affects are which is almost always a matter of perspective.

2) Culturally, yes. Muggleborn wizards fill a very similar niche as, for example, an American moving to the UK; there's some root cultural elements that carry over, but in many ways, it's an entirely new society that their perspective and ideas will then influence.

As for the level of involvement, no one is entitled to any level of involvement/influence in a society; it just happens organically as ideas are introduced. Muggleborn aren't entitled to march in and demand that this new society cater to their perspective and tastes any more than an American can move to the UK and demand that he continue to be allowed to carry his gun. But at the same time, literally the only way to stop them from having any influence over society is to cut them off from all contact.

As long as they interact with people, those people will learn from their perspective and ideas, which will in turn flavor their own perspective and ideas, and the people they interact with will do the same. That's how all cultures grow and evolve, and there's no more stopping that than the tides.

3) A society is nothing but a group of people; membership of it can be made to require whatever that group of people decide it does. It would be trivially easy to only send Hogwarts letters to the children of existing wizards, and as that's the only entry muggleborn wizards have, it would cut out muggleborns entirely. Whether or not they should, ultimately, comes down to one's perspective on the positives vs negatives mentioned in #1. As a general rule, I'd say no, because immigration is how you get continually growing populations which are required as an economic driver, but it's very possible magic obviates the need for such things, and it might well be only the cultural impacts which are a factor.

4) This one has a complicated answer. I would say the Ministry could absolutely claim authority over magic, such that accidental magic, the aftermath thereof, and/or muggleborn wizard(s) that learn to control said accidental magic would be their responsibility to handle the clean-up, especially as it comes to keeping muggles ignorant of magic. They would not have authority over muggleborn wizards however, and should not be able to regulate or influence the behavior of such any more than they would any other muggle.

5) Honestly, I don't particularly care. I'd be just as happy to reach a fic where Voldemort and co are nazis by another name as one where there's complex motivations and even potentially valid arguments for their actions. As long as the story's good, that's all just details.

 

Wizarding law, which is most likely explained by wizarding culture, is entirely decoupled from the muggle law in the same geographical borders; we can assume they were the same at one point, but they diverged with Secrecy. Allowing children to buy deadly weapons from a bizarre old man suggests a more individualist culture where a citizen's life is in only his own hands. I would imagine they lack a good Samaritan law for the same reason. Muggleborns couple the magical world with the nonmagical, and influence the culture and law by expressing opinions and theoretically assuming positions in government. Whether it's positive or negative depends on (a) whether they reform the society or assimilate, whether it really exists in any meaningful way or not and (b) whether or not the changes they propose are good, which is something that might not be revealed for centuries.
One would not think the pure bloods at any point sat down and thought about how their culture should work, it most likely evolved that way. I theorize that as they live in a world of Polyjuice, Imperius Curses and False Memory charms, transparency and honesty seem to be out of reach and unrealistic. They expect the government to be corrupt and other people not to have their best interests at heart. Newcomers either pick up on the nuances and the reasons why the culture works the way it does, fail to learn them and insist that it changes, or learn them and demand change all the same.

It is in a limited sense. They are born with magic rather than seeking it out, making them more like the children of citizens who were raised overseas, meaning some adjustment would have to take place. They are not a different race than the pure bloods, generally, but the same can be said for some real life immigrants, who end up being hard to distinguish.
It's worthy of note here and for the next question that while immigrants are people who seek out life in a new society, they have not necessarily correctly identified the problems with their own. My parents personally knew people from the Soviet Union who refused to believe that their lives had been terrible because the system is moronic and doesn't work; they insisted that it had been the capitalists who sneaked into the government to sabotage them. A more realistic, complex view of the ideological conflict should include the argument that muggleborns are trying to ruin the wizarding world by making it more like the one they left, and the characters opposing it would have to decide how much they really wanted wizarding Britain to change.

Basically, there's the rub. That they are born with magic strongly suggests that magic is genetic, that it is passed from parent to child only, and this seems to contradict the word muggleborn, one blood purists seem to refuse to employ. For them to be born with magic despite having no magical parents seems unlikely, as it suggests that magic can simply come out of nowhere, and the blood purists are more likely to believe that these children were products of infidelity or adoption, especially since they seem to be a recent phenomenon. The books indicate no period in history where they fought with pure bloods, meaning they either hid their lineage and integrated(this is implied in Hermione's understanding that some of the pure bloods are not really pure) or they didn't exist.
Rowling posits at some point that muggleborns are descended from Squibs who left the magical world either by abandonment or by choice, which seems to make more sense than the trait coming out of nowhere. If you can't turn a muggle into a wizard, you wouldn't think that any work of magic could turn, I don't know, a sperm cell, magical before or after it reached the womb. You'd think that a resolution to that angle of the conflict could be as simple as a DNA test, but one wonders how easily the pure bloods would accept that as evidence and not another weird muggle plot cooked up to undermine their society.
There seems to be no instance of a muggleborn not wanting to live in the magical world, though if that ever took place, the magical world would probably never know it.

When I read this, I tried to imagine what a Death Eater would say, and I chuckled for a moment.
'Well, we could always just exterminate them.'
Not to repeat what has already been said, that it seems perfectly necessary to enforce Secrecy, I would imagine that the complications of citizenship would be just as onerous for the blood purists to puzzle out as it would be for the muggleborns trying to justify their existence, making simple answers preferable. In my own thinking, it's fair for the Ministry to enforce Secrecy and subject the muggleborns to their laws, which is something that they themselves do not seem to contest. What would be unfair is if they followed the same laws and did not have the same rights, though that does not seem evident anywhere except in the dreams of the Malfoys.

My central objection to the Harry Potter series and every bit of fanfiction I read after that was that the Death Eaters had literally no argument and no reason for risking their children and fortunes in a violent conflict by submitting to the will of Voldemort, the absolute madman. I wanted them to be people who could think, worthy and compelling adversaries for our heroes. I wanted there to be something to blood purism, even if it were false there needed to be some way of convincing people it was true. The motivations of the bad guys didn't make any damn sense as they were, so I decided they were limited by Harry's perspective, that because he never had any reason to find out why people believed as they did, Rowling had no reason to type it out. (The bit in the seventh book about stealing magic was just so abysmally stupid I ignored it along with the epilogue; it was just book 7 nonsense. I highly doubt anyone believed it; it just served as a pretext to arrest the muggleborns.)
I wrote Rookwood on Blood Purism as basically a short story that explains what the Death Eaters might argue. I continued to fail to find anything resembling what I wanted, so I started work on a (probably) 7 book series and I'm currently writing the fourth.

 

I think the political tensions between Muggleborn who are sort of contemptful of wizarding norms on safety and freedom and Wizards who are old fashioned and think the government is there mostly for the Statute of Secrecy can be quite complex and interesting. Sort of analogous to libertarian vs more expansive notions of government.