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Notes -
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.
Why does it always come back to food?
No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.
Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)
I agree with you, it's a recurring pattern. Partly just because of the convenience of food. You don't need to learn a foreign language or study its history to understand it, hell these days you don't have to leave your house. You can get ethnic food delivered to your door, and stuff it down your throat without a thought. It's easy and fun to try different foods that way, but also considered hip and high-status to try lots of exotic ethnic foods, the more exotic the better.
It takes a lot more effort to engage with other parts of foreign culture. Listening to something like Indian sitar music or Mongolian throat singing, and it probably sounds weird and boring to most of us who didn't grow up with it. Much easier to listen to something like Kpop which is engineered to sound exactly like Western pop music, even including some English phrases and Western-style clothes. It's even harder to sit on a multi-hour foreign religious service. I've tried that (for Buddhism and Mexican catholicism) and found myself thinking "wtf am I doing here..." I imagine it would be even worse for someone who's less open-minded than me and believes strongly in their own religion.
What I enjoy the most is to actually spend time with people from foreign cultures, talking to them in depth in real life, and really getting to know them. It's fascinating! But I rarely get the chance to do that even when I'm travelling- people are busy, there's the language barrier, and many people just don't want to open up about their life that much. A lot of Westerners now have sort of learned that it's impolite to talk about certain topics, so they just kind of run away from talking about them. Once I read an interview with a student from an African country studying at an American college, and she said it threw her off how little anyone wanted to talk about her country. She was expecting all sorts of curious questions, but everyone was either not interested or afraid of being offensive, so it left her with little to talk about. That made me sad.
But there's also the darker part. When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances. In fact, most of it isn't. You don't have to dig much before you encounter something that makes you think "wow, that's awful." Well, awful by my standards, but of course there's lot of stuff in my American culture that they think is awful so.... we just have to live and let live. I can tolerate their extreme religion fanatacism if they can tolerate our incessant and disgusting advertising. Different cultures will also often have views way outside the Western mainstream norm on things like feminism, democracy, human rights, education, sexuality, or even just what foods are clean enough to eat.
For example: I've spent a lot of time in Seoul, and it always makes me laugh how awkward the tourism is there for western tourists. They come in expecting this fantasy land they saw in Kdramas and Kpop videos. They want to experience "traditional Korean culture," but in a way that makes for a cute instagram story. They're not prepared for stuff like:
All of that is culture too! you take the bad with the good. But that's intolerable for most western tourists. Much more comfortable to just eat some rice and grilled meat, take a picture of yourself wearing a colorful robe at the palace, buy a fan, and let the culture stop there.
I'm not really surprised about the other things, but I've heard from many sources the dog thing is rather exaggerated and not that common or culturally entrenched. I mean, for me it's like one of the most known memes about Koreans but I always thought it's being quite far from the actual situation. Have I been wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea
It was more common several decades ago, but it's in decline. The people who have eaten it before are of the older generation, and most of them do not consume it regularly.
If you're talking to a Korean online (especially in English), they probably have never eaten dog before.
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