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Does Mass Migration Always and Everywhere Lead to Populist Backlash?
No. It does not. I grew up in Texas during the era when the great replacement was just a factual thing that was happening, in circles which were not generally politically correct. Everyone knew we were going to have a Mexican plurality and be bilingual and the like soon. People grumbled a bit, but Trump still underperformed in 2016.
I remember my father ranting about how the Mexicans were more like the orientals(specific to vietnam war refugees) and chinamen(could also be koreans) of his childhood than like the blacks, who he thought shouldn't have full liberty of movement for crime control reasons. I recall blue collar workers talking about the need to learn Spanish to get on in their workplaces. I remember in school having to translate Spanish advertisements because that'll be the world we live in. And everyone was, if not happy about this, at least OK with it.
Of course there was grumbling about Hispanic customs like "having five names", but also praise of them for "being willing to work- you(young hydro) should take after that part". I remember people who now had to learn to speak Spanish, but also talking about how they go to church(which we should do more of, you are to understand from that part) and work hard and respect their bosses and the police. I recall lots of favorable comparison to local blacks, and griping that we(whites) brought it on ourselves by being too good to kill chickens for a living. And I remember even fairly low on the totem poll, people would say things like 'most of them are good people, I don't know about kicking them out'.
The current round of Texas border security is mostly after Haitians started arriving at the border en masse- and the core red tribe can check a map and note that walking to the border from Haiti has significant levels of geographic impossibility, so this is obviously a plot by the UN/Biden admin to hurt Texas by making us care for millions of non-contributing and criminally inclined blacks and centracos from who knows where. 'Somebody's paying for these people to come here and we can't even figure out what language they speak'. In my childhood, when it was all Mexicans? Nobody cared. The decent thing to do, up until after covid, when you found out someone was here illegally, was to not have heard it. Pre-fentanyl, pre-news headlines about people from 'not Mexico but countries south of there' busting through the border in organized groups.
Some people assimilate better than others. Canada turned racist because their newcomers were subcontinental; Britain turned racist because their newcomers, uh, set up rape gangs that the authorities allowed to operate with impunity on explicitly racial lines. In Texas? The Mexican restaurants where you can't order in English serve brisket and barbecue places offer Mexican street corn(which is, in fairness, delicious). White teenagers flirt in Spanish and switch to English when they hit the extent of their knowledge. Mexicans vote republican now. If Canada had opened their borders to Mexico and Vietnam instead of India, Trudeau would still have a job.
I don't know what my point is, it's an inebriated rant against a budding consensus on the Motte. I guess it's that there is no instinctive racism bone in Anglosphere countries that kicks in when things get extreme enough?
Canada already had a bunch of "subcontinentals". Sure, the proportion got worse but terms like "Bramladesh" predated the recent wave of temporary foreign workers. There is a general sense that immigrants have gotten worse, but this is true within the same group.
Canada's biggest problem in terms of generating populist backlash is that it has the worst housing crisis in the G7 and everyone wants to/has to live in the same few places. You can't drop those amounts of people into such a market without massive backlash.
People hated it when it was the Chinese middle and upper classes competing with them for housing and their hate grew proportionally the more people they had to compete with. They'd hate Mexicans too.
That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.
We saw huge numbers of people move in to a fairly small number of locales- the western two thirds of Texas are basically unpopulated, and most of the migrants went to just two metropoles, DFW and Houston. The rest mostly went to the other two major metros. Somehow, this avoided triggering a housing crisis.
Yet 100k or less triggered housing crises in NYC and Chicago. Both have governments more similar to those of Canadian cities. Conservatives would just chalk this up to leftism being incompatible with itself and reality.
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They probably built more housing. Good for them.
I don't see how this matters to the argument about what's driving Canadians.
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They build houses in Texas. DFW and Houston are both adding housing at a higher per capita rate than their population growth.
https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2024/03/19/texas-population-increase-htx https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-most-in-new-housing
Canada could have done this and not had housing prices rise. They chose not to, I guess because they don’t realize that more people need more buildings to live in. But it’s perfectly possible to expand the housing supply alongside immigration so prices stay stable.
The problem is that the government will not let house prices fall as a matter of policy. People who have bought into the housing
Ponzi schemeladder can't be allowed to lose their shirts. Solve, as they say, for the equilibrium.The DFW real estate market has been consistently rising during the period of replacement migration and it’s still rising today.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DAXRNSA
I'm seeing nearly zero gains from 2000-2012 and up 70% from 2012-2019 (and of course all hell broke loose during covid). At least for a while it seems like housing prices were under control in DFW.
Once you adjust for the Great Recession, this is a mild increase until 2012 started to see large increases.
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Thank zoning (or lack thereof).
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Leading to this beautiful exchange from a couple of years ago.
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There are a lot of variables that determine how people will respond to mass migration, including the number of migrants, the speed with which they arrive, the cultural distance between them and the native population, and how innately tolerant that native population is. You probably couldn't move 10 people across a mountain valley in New Guinea without triggering some sort of tribal war, while as we all know Anglos and their Germanic cousins are capable of passively accepting millions of alien newcomers every year without murdering them. This difference is partially genetic, but also in large part due to the development of social technologies that allow for cooperation across groups larger than Dunbar's number, of which organized religion, nationalism, and confucianism (if you consider it distinct from the other two) have been the most successful.
Now overall I'm pretty happy with the fact that most of us nowadays don't kill strangers on sight and think a continued expansion of our circle of care would be a good thing, but advancements in communication and transportation are threatening to overwhelm the capacities of our existing social technologies, and until they either adapt to the times or new ones are born from the ashes of our society, we are in a dangerous and volatile transition period (see all the comparisons between our present moment and European history between Martin Luther and Westphalia). This sense of an impending storm contributes to the growing wave of isolationist and nativist sentiment around the world but, conditional on continued economic growth and us all not getting turned into paperclips, it is in the longer view merely a tactical retreat, as competition between groups ultimately favors those able to marshall a larger population and greater resources.
Bringing things back down to Earth, I've been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and belonging as a result of the recent immigration kerfuffle. Growing up as a mixed-race State Department kid, I never really had a hometown, a nation (in the blood and soil sense), a church, or many of the other things that root people in time and space (though it turns out a few formative years in sub-Saharan Africa is a pretty good inoculation against many stupid ideologies). To the extent that I have a people to call my own, it is the coastal American PMC class with its mixture of whites and "elite" immigrants. I don't know whether the Indians (and others) I went to school with and whose weddings I attended represent the top 1%, 0.5%, 0.1%, or whatever of their cousins in the mother country, or what visas their parents came here on, but they are good people and at the end of the day no man should betray his friends.
I have looked for the old American nation that this class replaced and found only ghosts and the dusty pages of Tocqueville and Fischer. Once upon a time my grandfather was a school principal and a Mason who read Latin and coached wrestling in a small town with a general store and a train station and town hall meetings out of a Rockwell painting. There was one black family in town, courtesy of the Great Migration, but apart from that there was hardly even an Ellis Islander in sight (I'm told the previous generation had not been fond of Catholics or Jews). Now, half the buildings are empty and the meetings are about how to beg the federal government for grant money to fix the rusty pipes, or when they will have to finally close down the school because the only children born in the county are Amish. Whomever you blame for this state of affairs, the culture that built that place is dead and no amount of nationalistic necromancy will conjure up anything functional out of its corpse.
So your diagnosis as a rootless cosmopolitan is that the nation is dead?
There is a path forward for an American nation of some sort, but its relationship to the one that many here want to restore will be akin to that between 10th century Constantinople and 1st century Rome: if you squint there is continuity but it is obscured by changes in faith, language, ethnicity, and forms of government. The question of whether the future Spanish-speaking Catholic integralist American Empire (just to throw out one possibility) is truly American is one I will leave to the historians.
Since you never had a connection to the country in the first place, don't you think it's plausible that the quality that exalts a nation is invisible to you? I figured that was the source of the disdain inherent in the unironic use of the rootless cosmopolitan label.
Like is there a technologically evolving nation that hasn't changed with each generation? Why would anyone expect a millennium long continuity? There are still readily identifiable qualities that mark someone as American - Americans are loud, arrogant, bombastic, exhibitionist, individualistic, atomised, beautiful, image-obsessed, obese, too skinny, egalitarian, greedy, opinionated, angry and stupid, aggressive and dominating, etc. Unless that changes dramatically there is still a through line imo, but I don't know how to explain the actual meme, I think it's one of those things you get through cultural osmosis or you don't.
I have no problems spotting what in old travel guides would be called national characteristics and feel very keenly the points at which my parents' cultures grind against each other to produce sparks (in a way that they themselves never seem to fully grasp). I don't however hold that these characteristics are inherently bound to any given ethnos and that this should be the primary criterion by which political boundaries are drawn.
Regarding cultural change over time, the question, as Bryan Caplan puts it, is what makes cultural change through immigration worse than cultural change through time, if the end result is equally unrecognizable? The honest answer is usually "I want my descendants to look like me" or to put it autistically "I have a biological imperative to maximize the propagation of my genes." To be fair, my descendants looking like me was never really an option to begin with, so perhaps the value of this is lost on me; from where I stand having descendants at all seems sufficient.
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I also live in Texas and I absolutely do very moderately resent the prevalence of Spanish around me. I don't want to dox myself, but I'll say that over 25% of the members of my own team at my corporate desk job speak Spanish, and often will use it amongst themselves. Yes, I am aware of Texan history, and these coworkers aren't Tejano.
My family's lived in this country for many generations, and we all speak English! I stayed put in the country I was born in, so I expect to be able to communicate with the people in it. I don't fucking know Spanish!
As long as people are willing to use English with me, all is well. Conversely, if in some counterfactual world I had learned Spanish and I read this comment, I'd likely roll my eyes and think, "Skill issue."
They are willing to use English with you, though? It seems like almost all workplaces would require employees to use English if requested, maybe excepting the ones that hire only bilinguals. I don't see what skin it is off your back if they speak to each other in Spanish.
Serious question: have you ever worked in an environment with colleagues who only switch to your language when they want to talk to you specifically? It's really isolating, because it locks you out of all general chit-chat. You can't start conversations with people because they're already busy discussing something you can't participate in, and people don't start conversations with you because they think of you as someone who never talks.
This, plus it locks you out of a lot of initiative. Many situations in which you could offer a solution to some work problem and advance your career will entirely fly by you.
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I’ve worked with Albanians before, yes.
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I can't speak for your family, but a few generations back large parts of the state were speaking German. Which went away between 1917 and 1945 for reasons, but I'm sure there were some complaining about three languages back then.
It does seem like bilingualism, at least moderately ability, seems to be becoming more common, especially with intermarriage. It seems to (mostly) work for Canada, but I also expect ubiquitous machine translation to make things hopefully smoother.
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I think you should learn Spanish specifically because shooting the shit with Mexicans — and I’m putting Mexicans in a deserved pedestal above all other Spanish speakers here — is the funniest shit and will probably lead to a great improvement in your daily life.
I’m sorry but es la neta wey
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I'd just like to point out that you can still learn Spanish! It's pretty close to English. You might even like the exercise if you've never tried to learn a language before. You might even find that a low skill level can go a long way. I understand that it sucks that it has been incentivized to the extent it has in your case, but you do live in Texas, after all.
I know some Spanish (and am continuing to work on it), and it is fun. But I also completely agree with @stolen_brawnze here: immigrants need to be expected to learn English and try to integrate. The fact that they aren't expected to do that in America right now is incredibly frustrating. I don't think that "just learn Spanish" is really an adequate answer to this problem.
I'm pretty sure the individuals in this particular office do in fact speak English. There's a difference between the commands "learn English" and "speak only English in public for the rest of your life." The former is a perfectly reasonable demand, but the latter seems a bit extreme. If I meet an American living in Mexico I'm not going to speak to him in Spanish even if we are both fluent in it.
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I don't disagree with you, but some reckoning with reality is in order if you live in Texas and a significant amount of Spanish is being spoken around you. Spanish has pretty much always been useful there, hasn't it? At least as far back as "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", anyway. It's a question of is's and oughts. Yes, they should learn English, but they probably won't. Or they do know English and are speaking in Spanish alongside it for other purposes besides being forced to do so. It's a free country.
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America also chose not to designated an "official" language for the country
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Does starting a small fire in a dry forest always and everywhere lead to a forest fire? No - sometimes it rains, sometimes the fire brigade comes and puts it out, sometimes the wind just forcefully extinguishes it before it can get started. But there's no denying that starting an uncontrolled fire in a dry forest full of tinder is almost definitely going to start a forest fire.
It is more accurate to say that mass migration always creates the conditions required for a populist backlash - you can head that backlash off in a variety of different ways, but the consequences of mass migration are the dry tinder required for a populist backlash. Mass migration depresses wages(and eventually salaries) and drives up the costs of housing and other essentials of life. Simultaneously, it has a negative effect on social trust and cohesion (ever read Bowling Alone?), makes people less charitable and less likely to support their community. Of course, it isn't all bad - it makes things better for the wealthy and upper classes, at least for a while. Employers can treat their workers like shit and exploit them to a greater degree than before, and that might lead to some economic benefits (somebody is very clearly making a lot of money off replacing workers with H1B visa holders or illegal immigrants after all).
But ultimately, all of those negative consequences are baked into the cake of mass migration, and all of these negative consequences directly lead to populist backlashes. This doesn't mean that you'll get a populist backlash every time - if you're a globe-spanning empire with the ability to print as much money as you want, you can paper over those consequences with material goods and benefits. At the same time, you can employ a lot of social and cultural messaging to blunt the visible impact of those negative consequences or make participating in/feeding that populist backlash an incredibly bad career move. All of those approaches work, for a time. The only answers to quelling that backlash permanently are rather brutal - there wasn't a populist backlash from the muslim communities after the mass migrations of the reconquista because there weren't any muslim communities left to object.
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No, your points are obvious, even if there's a layer of frustration around how the consensus here seems to be shifting more and more towards Immigration Bad.
To be fair, there are three basic, fundamental points that are obvious to anyone with eyes but completely and utterly incomprehensible to a plurality of governments.... which were then punished soundly in elections:
"Immigrants change a location's culture." Further from this, there is a sliding scale that is not properly defined; there is a tendency for immigrant enclaves to form, with their own communities, rules, and culture often independent of the local culture. Assimilation does happen, but it leaves everyone changed; the spice bag is a Chinese invention but distinctly Irish.
"Some people, or rather, cultures assimilate better than others." As mentioned, this is obvious to anyone with eyes, but two of the largest pillars in the liberal consensus are equality of opportunity and blank slatism. The state refuses to distinguish these groups, because that would cause these pillars to creak, the fiction would break down, and then we go straight to the politics of naked racial spoils, something they are hesitant to do without talking out of both sides of their mouth. (For people who think the politics of naked racial spoils is where we are already, it might be instructive to look at Indian caste politics, or the current state of South Africa. Remember, it can always get worse!)
"Illegal immigration is illegal." People see that the laws are not enforced, and they lose respect for all the other laws as well. People see uneven enforcement of laws, and they correctly deduce they are living under anarcho-tyranny. Making it worse is that the argument is lost; Trump will try his best/do his worst but there are so many illegal immigrants in America that this would be a herculean undertaking, requiring a gift of logistics and planning that I believe is beyond America's current state capacity.
The consensus around immigration is unfortunately set by America, and not just America - the monied, culturally dominant PMC America, which prides itself on being a nation of immigrants as they see large economic and personal benefits from having access to internationally fungible imported labor. The top % of American earners don't have to engage or interact with the changing culture due to the way money can move faster and cheaper than people, and can afford to live in gated communities with private security.
Assimilation is part of the issue, but so are the structural concerns of the location taking on those immigrants. To OP's point, we can't just allow large groups to ignore the laws of the land. Part of what went wrong in Canada is that Indian subcultures are basically carrying out hits against each other for beef back in India, and the government just kind of let it happen
Surely it was lentils, perhaps mutton at most
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