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So, there's some talk downthread about Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants and such. Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.
But, the interesting thing is the questions about "why" anybody puts up with them and well, at least according to local business owners, because they're more likely to show up to do the job and not fail a drug test than the righteous pure American's currently living there.
https://youtube.com/watch?si=nke3DETnGvcaAHE4&v=FA80DOcJnu8&feature=youtu.be - Youtube video
https://x.com/otis_reid/status/1833578554778374462 - Quote from the factory owner.
Of course, 2016 J.D. Vance would probably agree with this factory owner about the get up 'n' go of this socioeconomic group of people instead of defending them from economic competition from supposedly mentally deficient Haitians.
Now, to quote a lot of Twitter, it is true the Haitians are ruining that community's traditions, by actually getting to work and not showing up high.
The various European groups that migrated to the US in the past were and are more similar to each other in terms of political views & shared cultural history than they are to the populations that arrived post WWII. Concluding that current migration is going to work out favorably from past European migrants being able to form a coherent new identity under vastly different socio-economic circumstances is a reach. From surveys like the GSS or others, it seems pretty likely that adding more migrants from places like Haiti, Central America or Africa isn't going to result in a smooth temporal continuity of extant American cultural sentiments about various things like immigration, free speech or the economy like you seem to imply.
As an aside, I remember reading a similar argument by you in the past, and sure enough going through my post history this turns out to be the third time I post this objection to the same kind of argument put forth by you. I don't expect you to concede, but given that you've never responded so far to me or others pointing out more or less the same thing, it'd be interesting to hear where you think this counterpoint goes wrong.
1.) If you would've told a British person they were basically the same as a Serb or Bulgarian in I don't know, 1851, they likely would've punched you and called you some weird slur nobody knows anymore. But, also, the whole "these ethnic groups are all similar too each other so that immigration was OK, it's just these people won't be able to do it," is literally the same argument made against Italians, Jews, Slavs, and hell, the Swedes at one time. This weird 'we're all white and should have solidarity' is a thing that never existed. As I've might've said before, as the descendent of Pole's, it's actually far more likely some ancestor of current non-college educated half-German guy in rural Ohio did a bit of light war crimes of ancestors of mine, as far as nothing bad has been done to my ancestors by non-European immigrants, so why should I, as argued below, have solidarity with them on racial lines?
2.) I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week. Yes, yes, the culture will change around that - welcome to being in the position of Bill the Butcher in 1863 upset the Irish were changing things or whatever. We're not some European country where people stay on the same patch of land for 9,000 generations. Things shift and change, and whatever you think was the perfect time that we globalists ruined was a time of ruin and destruction for some a generation or two older than you.
As far as imparting cultural sentiments, I don't know, Trump seems to be winning over Hispanic's fine. A little economic success leading to ladder pulling does not know color. It's an American tradition.
3.) Which is probably my inherent bedrock disagreement on where we don't agree - America's not getting worse to me. There are issues, as always, but in the long run, even with Trump, things continue to progress bit by bit.
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
Sub-saharan African-immigrant populations are largely assimilating in terms of average outcomes of crime, educational attainment, and earning (see here) and appear to be mostly being dragged down on group averages by Somali immigrants specifically. Kenyan immigrants, for example, out-earn US-born citizens on average ($70,000/household vs. $66,000/household). Cameroonians and Liberians similarly have lower poverty rates than either the migrant population as a whole or native-born Americans (9% each vs. 14% of the immigrant population and 12% of the native-born population).
The repeated discussion of whether or not the native-born African American population is genetically distinct and disadvantaged from the general African population, that is the losers of a historical fitness competition, seems to gain another data point in its favor.
Though of course it's something of a folly to group together Somalis with Yoruba with Hausa with Ngala, it's at least a data point.
It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.
Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).
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