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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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So Ed West has a good piece up on immigration. He's British, so naturally he will focus on the British angle but I think his main takeaways have wider applicability across the West. His argument is that so-called "experts" have consistently underestimated the potential for mass migration for decades. Ed makes the case that given a confluence of factors (established migrant communities, English being the lingua franca, a whole apparatus of NGOs/judicial activists and a very pro-immigration media envionrment), we're likely to see a continued rise in immigration unless there is a drastic shift in policies.

For my part, I think any serious restriction is out the window. That ship has basically sailed for the West. Trump did what he could but was sabotaged by the courts and political insiders at every step. So instead of trying to prevent what is essentially the inevitable, better ask what our future look like.

American social scientist Garrett Jones has written an important new book which argues that new research suggests that assimilation is fact very rare and cultural patterns persist for decades, perhaps even centuries. Even if we were to restrict ourselves to white immigration, how many of the Catholic and East European immigrants who came to the US during the 1870-1924 period truly assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon ethos of limited government? Was JFK's and FDR's winning coalitions not in small part due to these new immigrants?

Jones makes the case that even attitudes like propensity to save or social trust are passed down through generations. This would suggest that the future of the West is a hyper-unequal and low-trust society. Perhaps we are already well on our way. Politically, it could paradoxically help the right since to enact a leftist agenda on economics you need a cross-racial coalition among the working class and this seems to be unlikely if you cannot have assimilation across population groups even after decades, as Jones suggests.

I hope Jones credited anechonicmedia for that insight.

He(?)'s the only person I've seen doing the actual math on it with General Social Survey data though. Is that the same way Jones supports his argument?