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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?
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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