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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.
Here is the Yglesias tweet. Note that this is very specifically a response to a screenshotted Matt Walsh tweet.
The Walsh argument (if you can call it that) is thus:
There exists at least one place in the United States (Dearborn) which has a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms.
It would be bad if the entire country was majority Muslim and had Islamic cultural norms.
Therefore Dearborn Michigan having a majority Muslim population and Islamic cultural norms is bad. (This isn’t explicitly stated, but I think it is strongly implied.)
Matt Yglesias responds to this by pointing out a counterexample; Little Italy 100 years ago had a majority Italian population and Italian cultural norms, and yet this didn’t result in the Italianification of American society.
This is not intended to be a fully general argument in favor of immigration. It is a response to a specific bad argument. If you are already anti-immigration, you probably read Walsh’s argument and fill in the gaps with your own pre-existing cognitive scaffold, but none of that is actually there in the text that Yglesias is responding to.
I'm trying to be maximally charitable to both Matts, and its a bit weird in application because Yglesias is clearly not being charitable to Walsh. Not that I'd expect him to be, Yglesias is a hack, whereas Walsh is more your standard grifter.
Walsh's argument appears to be "These folks do NOT share critical factors that make for idealized American citizens, and if they don't assimilate, this is clearly going to degrade the shared experience of other Americans in their area and make the country worse for everyone else, on net."
That is, having an entire (local) government run by people who don't share your ideals, and having their ideals prioritized over that of the locals is going to inflict some low level misery on the citizens who were there first, in the best case scenario.
Then Walsh pushes the scare line "if these norms become widespread it'll degrade the entire country from its founding ideals."
Which doesn't have to be an argument that it is going to happen, I interpret it as "imagine it happening to you and consider if you want to allow it to continue."
Same reason we're supposed to empathize with Iryna aruska. No, there's not going to be an epidemic of crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport. But we should clearly not prefer crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport as a public policy matter, right?
There is NOTHING in Walsh's post that actually implies that this WILL be America in 50 years.
In contrast, Yglesias is basically implying that Italians assimilated (although its such a spurious comparison for the reason the OP intimated) and it didn't result in America becoming Italian, therefore Muslim enclaves are objectively a good thing if we just let them become Americanized.
Which is great if you believe that American Culture is coherent and pervasive enough to overpower a culture that is much, much larger by geography, population, historical tradition, and, ultimately, successful resistance to assimilation/co-opting by outsiders.
I mean, yes, the local Muslim population is tiny, but would anyone argue they're NOT plugged in to the hundreds of millions of other Muslims throughout the globe?
The smaller irony is that we can look FURTHER back in history to compare what happens when Italians conquer a place vs. when Muslim Arabs conquer a place: the Roman and Ottoman empires, respectively.
As a matter of history, Rome's approach to ruling is quite permissive if the conquered territory kicked back its taxes and was willing to pitch in to defend the place from other powers.
Ottomans were a bit less permissive, up to and including Forced Conversion to Islam.
It turns out that the cultural norms a given nation or people hold dearest has huge implications for how these cultures will propagate and interact with other cultures they encounter, and you can't ignore that when predicting future paths.
(I'm not pushing this forward as a knockdown argument)
In other words, Matt Yglesias' flippant reduction of cultural differences to merely additional food choices is pretty laughable as a response, when the larger point Matt Walsh is making is that there are features of culture that are critical to a nation's cohesion, and cultural differences can include features that make assimilation less likely and co-existence less desirable.
Food choice is an utter Red Herring. Pun sort of intended.
Italians, via proof by demonstration, didn't have those assimilation-resistant features. It does NOT stand to reason that Muslims will thus assimilate too. Indeed, we can see from the example of Orthodox Jews that it is entirely possible to maintain a religious community very much separated from the larger overculture. But of course, Orthodox Jews don't seek to convert others to grow their ranks. Muslims do.
The Ottoman Turks were not Arabs. Turkish immigration has caused its own interesting set of issues, what with Imam Gulem's network of dodgy charter schools, but they are profoundly different to the ones Arabs cause. Turkish Cypriot immigration to the UK has been trouble-free, though it isn't clear if it has been an economic net positive.
If we are keeping score, the Ottoman Empire was also rather less assiduous than the Romans when it comes to persecuting Christians.
The actual Arab conquests were also full of forced conversion to Islam, arabization, etc.
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