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Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now). The argument was basically “you like lasagna right? Well if we didn’t allow Italians to immigrate no lasagna. And now Italians are pretty indistinguishable from other Americans so clearly that will be the case with others such as Somalians. Think of the future lasagna equivalent you’d get with no cost since the immigrants will assimilate.”
Leave aside the HBD argument. It seems to me that one Matt and those who make this argument miss is the massively different technology that exists today that didn’t exist in yesteryear. If you left Italy in the late 1800s, you couldn’t easily get back routinely to see family (whereas now it’s maybe a days travel). You couldn’t FaceTime them at a whim. You couldn’t text message them. The populations were truly cut off.
It is likely harder to assimilate in the modern world where immigrant populations are not cut off as opposed to the old world. So pointing to historic examples of assimilation do not hold for today because the factors have changed. Now maybe you still think there will be assimilation for different reasons. But you need to make that argument. Comparing like and unlike however cannot be your argument.
I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument? Maybe they aren’t smart. Maybe they don’t encounter enough arguments to the contrary. Or maybe they are propagandists. I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.
I think at the core the real problem is that no universal arguments are actually possible in these spaces, and it really is who / whom all the way down. I'm not saying that to say Yglesias is arguing in bad faith; I mean, instead, that I think he believes something about universal arguments that simply doesn't work. Ironically, the argument I'm about to make might get slotted into an intersectional, post-modern, identity politics one these days, except on impermissible lines.
But let me make an analogy. I have a friendly acquaintance who has a PhD in English. Really clever and funny guy. And, importantly for this story, he's a not especially rabid or antagonistic atheist of Russian Jewish descent. And at some point, a decade ago, we were at a barbeque, and he was talking about the time that he had spent, earlier in his academic career, in a university in northern Utah. Obviously a very homogenous, very LDS part of the country. And at some point, he made some joke in passing about how stiflingly and uncomfortably Mormon the whole place was, but fortunately "we" had managed to get a lot of Supreme Court rulings that were making being that way much less possible in public, "we" were half way there, and "we" just needed another batch of Supreme Court rulings to finish the job and make it possible for "normal" people to move there and not be hassled by the religiously homogenous. I want to say immediately that 1) he said this in a somewhat wry way, and 2) the "we" he was clearly referring to, and that he assumed I was an unobjectionable part of, was "smart, cosmopolitan, well-educated progressives". He didn't have a particular strong atheist or Jewish identity, as far as I could tell (and in the best of progressive Jewish fashion, he married a progressive Catholic woman later).
And on the one hand, I can totally imagine that, for a clever, wry, atheist academic of Russian Jewish extraction from New England, being in homogenous LDS communities would be pretty alienating. And I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity. And from that view point, mass immigration especially, along with progressive public schools and university educations and Hollywood narrative promulgation, are all unabashed goods, creating a more comfortable, more desirable world.
But as a matter of fact, much of my extended family is true believing LDS, some of it out west, and I'm very, very familiar with the LDS stories of their founding, and the religious persecution they faced early on, and the incredible lengths they went to and sacrifices they made to carve out space to live out their own values and their own beliefs. And if the actual criteria for universal progress in America is "to what extent can a wry progressive academic atheist of Russian Jewish extraction move anywhere in the country and always feel comfortable", as far as I'm concerned, that's equivalent to saying, "we all must agree that progress means all sincerely religious people need to accept social changes that functionally amount to a repudiation of the kind of religious tolerance that evolved after the horrors of the 30 Years War. And in practice this will be experienced as something like a soft ethnic cleansing". It is literally meaningless to say you can just be LDS as a matter of silent belief in your head that doesn't get expressed in the world through community behavior. That's the kind of religious tolerance the Bolsheviks and current China support.
And the actual experience of integrating all those Catholic immigrants into American society over the course of the 20th century absolutely did get experienced, in many ways, like a kind of soft ethnic cleansing, or it certainly was by the parent or grandparent generations watching their home cultures and home religions get completely melted away by mass culture, Hollywood, public schools, and later universities. There was a huge amount of legitimate trauma. There's definitely an undercurrent of all of that in my reading about the 60s, the 70s, forced busing, and the white ethnic turn towards the Reagan coalition later. J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" is a great book about a lot of these tensions. Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land" likewise captures some of that sense in rural Tea Party southerners now.
I know I'm kind of focusing more on religion than "ethnicity" here, but to be honest, even going along with a "racism" frame about immigration is already a way of asserting something about why these issues matter that seems, as far as I can tell, audaciously out of step with the actual on-the-ground experiences of why immigration actually ends up so fraught in practice.
Noah Smith recently wrote a tweet that was something about how he had lived in cosmopolitan neighborhoods with lots of diverse immigrants all his life, those neighborhoods were always great and benefited from that, and therefore anyone who had a problem with such neighborhoods was just wrong or ignorant or something.
Franklin Foer a year ago wrote an Atlantic piece (archive version of the original version here: https://archive.is/rzozj) that is really quite interesting titled "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending", and it covers a lot of interesting ideas, but it does it really good job of fleshing out a much more detailed version of the argument that my PhD friend made, too.
I'm legitimately sorry this post is so Jewish example heavy - those just happen to be the most well-articulated examples I have at hand, and the Foer piece in particular is quite interesting in all sorts of ways - but I do want to emphasize that a lot of the university connected non-Jewish progressives I'm currently around would likely agree with much of these arguments, so I really do think it's a progressive thing.
I know I'm not quite responding to the parent post (especially about the role of changing technology in making assimilation harder), but I think it's actually really important to be much more clear-eyed about the reality of the previous cycle of mass immigration and assimilation. Some of the facts on the ground have changed (broadcast media and Hollywood matter less, social media complicates things, there was a way that intellectual confidence and energy in internationalism was ascendant in that previous era in a way that it clearly isn't now), but it's also definitely the case that much of the retconning about the previous experience of immigration is very... selective... about who has written those stories, and which experiences get captured and recounted.
The Catholic Church In America had a ginormous amount of cultural soft power; thé hayes code was set by bishops as much as anyone else for just one example.
The important thing to note is how much of this soft power was renounced voluntarily. And sûre, maybe it couldn’t have been held on to anyways. But they didn’t really try; the decision to integrate was more or less voluntary.
The decision to integrate coincided with the general decline of religiosity across the western world that followed the 1950s. Only one major Christian movement - American Protestantism - held on long after the others (European Protestantism, Lutheran and other, and Catholicism in general) fell, and that was in large part because of the unique success of the evangelical televangelists and the Christian revival movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, led by extraordinarily capable preachers like Billy Graham and supported by an embrace of modern media and to some extent music. Catholics tried to copy some of this with happy clappy post Vatican II masses and so on, but it never had the same vitality.
The evangelical revival preserved a religious Christian (not social customs; divorce and single parenthood still rose of course) identity among otherwise deracinated American Protestants and the many, many Catholics who converted to it for almost two generations after most Europeans largely abandoned regular churchgoing Christianity. It didn’t really die, not wholly anyway, until the mid-2010s, and even today hangs on due to comparatively higher birth rates and the large scale conversion of Latin American Catholics and their descendants, both in their homelands and in the US.
Catholics didn’t have that, and so a combination of suburbanization due to white flight clearing out the old ethnic neighborhoods and throwing various white ethnics and founding whites together in suburbia and the decline in Catholic mass attendance led to intermarriage and the merging into a shared American identity. Sometimes this is laid at the feet of WW2, but I disagree. The New York or Philadelphia of, for example, 1949 was still very much a place with distinctly separate white ethnic identities. It happened 10-30 years later.
American Catholicism declined following thé decision to relax social controls; obviously post hoc non ergo propter hoc, but also prior hoc ergo non propter hoc.
I certainly agree that the American Catholic Church was not going to maintain its fifties peak. But the looming decline was not in 1965 something that was generally known.
I think honestly it’s because it wasn’t authentic in a sense. They didn’t embrace the happy clappy because they thought it would make better Catholics, they kinda did it to appeal to outsiders.
I'm not necessarily convinced of that. I think attempting to evangelize was part of the motivation, but an even bigger part just seems to be that this is what people liked back then, especially for poorly-catechized mid-century American Catholics who were living through a period where their religion seemed to be changing by the minute in ways that were unprecedented and unexpected. Catholics at the time didn't know how to deal with such radical change, so they defaulted to things that they knew from the outside or felt good to them. Happy clappy songs among them.
Lower-mid level clerics liked it- laypeople didn’t get a say under the old system or in the post Vatican II era. It didn’t matter what they thought either way.
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