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America has already integrated a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities into one country. We have done it successfully for 250 years. Successfully enough that we just lump "white" people into a single category. Europe has dozens of bloody and heated rivalries that were plenty active up until 50 ish years ago.
There is an argument to be made that we are no longer doing the things that allow for successful integration, but saying integration is impossible seems clearly wrong.
I want to remind you that integration involves forced assimilation, suppression of native languages, strict discrimination, and sending the failures back.
That was how we barely assimilated the Catholics, and it also involved 40 years of closed borders. It involved the President of the United States saying things like the man who carries a hyphen carries with him a dagger with which to stab the republic in the back.
We don't do any of this any more. The machine is broken. The planes aren't coming back. The Mexicans are still Mexican, the Chinese and Japanese haven't even merged into Asian, never mind become American. And we're not even trying with the muslims. Why are there so many muslims now, and why in the last ten years only, and what, exactly, is your plan for integrating them into America?
I have a millenia of history showing me that muslims don't integrate anywhere they go. What's your evidence against?
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Yeah, if you account for actual civil war, forced boarding schools for natives and other populations, "educating" religion, culture and language out of their slave population, fierce fight against hyphenated Americans since WW1, it was remarkably successful.
USA is not exceptional in this sense, many other countries did the same forced assimilation, except we now use different words for those projects such as Germanisation, Russification, Magyarization, Italianization etc. If anything, there is actually a European "melting pot" project not unlike USA - France. In the past it was very diverse country of many smaller nations speaking different languages and having diverse histories: Occitan South, Celtic/Bretonian West, Flemmish and Germanic North East and various others. France pursued aggressive assimilation in form of forced secular republican tradition and generations of focused public school education. It worked beautifully so much so, that by 1951 French approved usage of local minority languages in schools, firm in their sense of victory after centuries of the project. It remains to be seen if it was not a hollow victory.
I absolutely agree that this works relatively well - although even there are many exceptions. There are some very tenacious ethnicities like Roma, or Basque etc. It however does not mean that it will work forever, there is equal number of examples of failed assimilations and ultimate splinter of states even in Europe.
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Blacks remain meaningfully unassimilated after all these years, probably because of the many third world cultural and genetic traits they have. That does not bode well for the future. Assimilating whites and east asians is not proof that you can assimilate anyone.
Black culture is not very third world. It’s dysfunctional, sûre, but it’s the kind of dysfunction that the urban poor in developed countries exhibit, not the kind of dysfunction that tends to be more common in actually poor countries. They are also culturally quite similar to their white actual neighbors- not the well heeled ones from the other side of the city. Have you been around white trash? Being poor and dysfunctional is not the same thing as being unassimilated.
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How are you defining "assimilation" in this context and what sort of evidence would you present to support this claim if asked?
My evidence would mainly be that for almost all immigrant groups they have followed a pattern of starting off relatively separate and economically down and then in a generation or two melted into the pot culturally and their economic results either hit around the median or even a little higher.
Blacks, despite being here longer than most of these groups and 70 years of actively tilting the scales to give them a hand up remain more culturally distinct and economically downtrodden. This pattern does not match to any European or east asian groups, but does map pretty well to third world migration, especially in Europe, where 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th generation think of themselves as GROUP first and NATIONALITY second (if that), are culturally and economically separate from the main body. Again, patterns that hold pretty well for blacks in America.
And they constantly bring up slavery as if it was just abolished last week, in all manner of crazy contexts. I've seen Los Angeles public transit buses called "slave ships", and the fucking Library of Congress referred to as "the plantation". They never get tired of their schtick.
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I do not disagree with you that this issue is one of "GROUP first and NATIONALITY second" but I would urge you to notice who is promoting that distinction and why.
The scales aren't being tilted "to give them a hand up" as we can see how those that argue that the tilt is necessary react to those who are able to succeed on their own merit. No, the scales are tilted because the left needs that "GROUP first and NATIONALITY second" distinction to be maintained if they want to remain electorally viable.
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Do we have large income gaps between black populations and non-black populations in the US?
If you spend enough time on Twitter you begin to realize any time some SES graph shows up by geography they all look identical. And they are all very similar to % black population. Whether it’s income, murder, life expectancy or whatever else you can think of that shows outcomes you see worse outcomes in heavily black areas.
Even if you do something like group white people versus black people by income you end up finding things like the children of the top 10% of black parental income have the same chance of ending up in jail as bottom income whites.
So basically you can do all kinds of statistical test by race and find huge differences. These things aren’t disputed by the right and the left. They dispute the meaning of these statistical tests. It’s also at the heart of disparate impact is proof of racism.
The lack of convergence to similar outcomes is the evidence for a failure to assimilate.
Is this actually what we see though? About 1/3rd of Georgia's population is black and yet and it's GDP per capita (roughly $82k) is comparable to that of Norway and Switzerland. How do you explain that?
Personally, I suspect pretty much all scholarship on this topic to be an ugly mish-mash of academic bullshit and statistical ignorance.
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The lack of convergence can be better explained by genetics than culture. Especially if you have black children of well off parents (who would be raised in a different culture) still reverting to the average of their race on a bunch of life outcomes.
If anything American culture as a whole has assimilated into black culture. Black athletes, pop stars, comedians, and actors have outsized representation.
People get culturally assimilated in the US, but not necessarily genetically assimilated.
When choosing immigrants you care a lot about outcome assimilation and that has not occurred likely because of genetics. Now blacks have a claim to America as their homeland because they have been here a long time but the lack of outcome assimilation is a strong argument against letting any group immigrate to the US.
And while American culture is a melting pot between Anglo and black culture it’s also clear that there is a culture gap between the two groups which probably does have a genetic component.
So while modern American culture is a combination of both groups we don’t really want to add more groups that can’t blend into existing American culture especially when a large part of that is likely genetic. It’s still a strong argument against immigration.
Full assimilation would be to not be able to find group differences between people of different ancestry so even if the cause is genetics the two groups haven’t assimilated by formed one society of distinct groups.
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I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.
This fails the test of high filtration. I do in fact have highly assimilated black ADOS friends. But it’s a small % of the population. The last cycle of African immigrants to the US were highly filtered.
The closest thing we have to unfiltered African population in America would be Somalis and they are not assimilating. And Europe is having similar issues with unfiltered African migration.
The only examples we have of mass migration in the west completely failed to assimilate over 100’s of years.
African Immigrants to the US with filtration also tend to get the benefits of being able to reap the benefits of programs that were aimed at advancing ADOS people and thus get a massive boost to their career and academic outcomes.
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Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.
I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.
Yes but children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents, chain migration is going to be something that gets lobbied for exhaustively and without end and is closer to unfiltered. There's also a certain social effect where the children of people who had top 1% outcomes in life to get out of Bumfuckistan and get to the West, even if intelligent, will fall short of parental accomplishments/expectation and then blame it on Racism instead of recognizing their parental achievement.
This is particularly exacerbated in a decent amount of groups where the family that chose to remain in the country of origin are actually doing pretty damned well (since they're top 1%ers intelligence-wise in an emerging economy, a lot of which have gone gangbusters especially if you are in that 1%) and thus look back at their cousins who are still at home and see they've got insane luxury lifestyles whilst their parents choosing to bail on Bumfuckistan has earned them, the children, an upper middle class lifestyle. I grew up with a lot of Asian diaspora Western-born first generation immigrants where this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.
Then inevitably a torrent of bitching about 'wah my cousins all get random do-nothing sinecures and drive Lamborghinis around all day, it's the rice ceiling keeping me down in the West' when they should have just stayed in the initial country where they were of the upper crust.
Vietnam has spent decades rapidly climbing out of crushing poverty, yet the number of centi-millionaires there was still only 58 just a couple years ago. If you know close relatives of 2+ centi-millionaire families, your experience may not be statistically normal. I know it's easier for a whole family than for an individual to amass that total wealth, but even plain millionaire individuals number only in the few tens of thousands in Vietnam.
Qualitatively, though, I'd bet there is a "big fish in a small pond" effect that applies to many more people. PPP is an average over many classes of goods, and some things (real estate, anything Baumol-effected) are much more affordable to Vietnamese residents than to Vietnamese-Americans here.
Unfortunately I couldn't audit their finances in detail, but the luxury goods they consumed and the way that their cousins gambled seemed indicative that they've got enough money to be 'ultra rich' inside Vietnam. Maybe not 9-figures explicitly, but I'm aware of 8 figures worth of cars owned by one of those families and that's just the overseas offspring without knowing a ton about their parents.
Baumol is huge for this sort of stuff. Servants and labor are vanishingly cheap compared to what they are in the West. I've had coworkers go back to India after getting remote privileges and turn 100k USD per annum into 3 live-in servants and a very nice house in second-tier cities
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I suspect that Vietnam's numbers of the Rich are somewhat underreported due to a large amount of corruption in play over there, though 'capable of living the lifestyle of a 'rich person' in the West' is likely considerably cheaper due to Baumol and service roles being 10% of the cost. You're also probably going to have more leeway to get around potential legal barriers to your wealth like taxes. On the other hand, it could be VND Centi-Millionaires since that's only about 4k USD.
I'm based in SEA currently and FIRED and I'm fairly sure if I tried to mimic my current lifestyle it'd cost me about 10x what I'm paying for it now and I'm somewhere that's not as cheap as Vietnam.
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There are populations in Africa that are pretty smart. It is an oversimplification to talk about blacks. There are too many different populations.
That's true, but they do also get to benefit from a bunch of programs and systems that were essentially expressly setup to deal with ADOS and associated globalized guilt over them. I went to University with a guy who was Igbo, had forehead scarring and was son of a mid-tier UN official and had a very nice setup in Nigeria from what I saw on Instagram. He ended up getting instantly hired as a graduate into a cushy diversity role before getting bored after 2 years and returning home to get back to the Princeling lifestyle. He wasn't a genius but also was like solid level for the course I was doing. No sane person would call him unprivileged.
Also true. I do wonder if long term that is bad for the Igbo. Assuming in 200 years there is still an economic return to hard work and intelligence do you short circuit selection pressure when the economic return is provided regardless of hard work and intelligence?
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They just join the mass of DSA failsons who are disproportionately white who blame the same downward mobility on capitalism.
It stands out because people hate this behavior more from foreigners (or "foreigners"), and the DSA-types know better than to appear as a movement of white failsons looking to loot others. Better to do it in the name of minorities.
True, though the DSA failsons are frequently getting actively selected against for University and Jobs plus their parents weren't as filtered-for in their mildly-accomplished careers in the West and thereby you'd expect less of an issue with mean regression.
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Provided you teach scientific racism in civics class. Otherwise society sees highly filter of “X” group being fine. So you loosen the standards. Then the existing group does chain migration and brings over wives and parents. And now you have a voting block to pressure government to let more of their people in.
I’ve had Paki friends shocked when they went to Pakistan and found out their country isn’t as smart as all the brown skinned friends in the states and had no realization of how highly selected for his father was.
So basically non of this works unless you teach racism in public schools.
That plus when they go home a lot of the time the family that managed to get their father out of Pakistan is in the top 0.1% in terms of resources and education so they are frequently living larger than the Father who went overseas and is now paying Western COL with Western Salary wages.
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