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We used to insist on assimilation. That was why Greeks are now okay. I don’t know about the race angle, I don’t put much stock in that, but we have absolutely stopped even trying to assimilate all of these immigrants into Amerikaner culture. In 1900, leaving your homeland meant to give up all of that and become American. To give up dress and language and hygiene standards and traditions and to eventually absorb American culture— our language, culture, food, religion, sports, games, music, and so on. Now, it’s actually seen as a bad thing that a third generation Chinese or Nigerian kid acts mostly like an American. That they no longer speak the language or play the games or listen to the music. In fact, fashionable Americans were often insistent on practicing and celebrating those other cultures. They race to bring up pagan Hindu holidays, or Muslim holidays, or Indian, Korean or Japanese music. It’s partly that technology allows this. In 1950, you could not get those kinds of things in America.
Rep Peter King (IRA-NY) was fundraising, based on Old World ethnic grudges, for a private war against a US treaty ally on the streets of New York, and nobody in state or local politics had a problem with this until 9-11 - even after the Irish ambassador boycotted the St Patrick's Day parade over the issue.
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I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not clear to me that the 19th-century European immigrants ever did assimilate, at least in the way that matters. @Opt-out says we "will be stuck with poorer governance forever" - I consider the possibility that this has already happened, that we have been stuck with poorer governance for this whole time, and that it's far too late to do anything about it. The only reason why people assume that the Irish/Italians/etc. did successfully assimilate is because nobody alive today remembers a time before they showed up. Those of us who live in big cities have just come to accept a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society.
The problem I have with this (among many) is that if you know anything about English society in the 18th and 19th century, you'd know that it was already riddled with corruption and gangsterism, and governance in the American colonies (and subsequently the United States) had many of the same pathologies (not necessarily as bad, probably in large part due to the more expansive franchise). The idea that non-Anglo immigrants were introducing corruption into a basically honest Anglo-American political culture is highly questionable.
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I think most people would agree with this as potentially the votes for FDR and The Great Society and the creation of the welfare state. Where this would break down is Europe and Canada do more of this. The ‘80s Revolution still occurred in America. Now perhaps the push back would have been bigger without the Catholic influence on culture.
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The claim that immigrants have stopped assimilating is not really in evidence. Language acquisition, intermarriage rates, even religious adoption to a not-insignificant degree all point to assimilation proceeding apace. Insofar as there is substance to this point, it seems to be a complaint that immigrants are assimilating to the "wrong" American subcultures (e.g. East/South Asian immigrants mostly assimilating into urban white liberal culture), but even that is pretty mixed. There was never as much daylight between Latino and Southern American culture as nativists pretend, and Latinos have been assimilating pretty well.
Conversely, the period of "insistence" on assimilation yielded a number of distinct white-ethnic subcultures (e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish) over the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Most are still present to this day in attenuated forms. The big standout in both its presence at the time and lack of presence now is German American culture, which didn't survive the world wars.
What is "Amerikaner culture"? The only thing I can find is a group promoting white SA immigration to the US, but I'm guessing that's not what you're talking about.
Latinos however show no signs of stopping their support for government redistribution, speech restrictions or ending their apathy towards gun rights.
The surface attributes of these groups were annihilated or absorbed, true, but all of these and the other big European heritage groups show significant opinion differences on pretty foundational value questions to this day. In the GSS, it is an extremely consistent result that Anglo-Germanic-Americans tend towards small government, libertarian or classical liberal answers on political and cultural questions, whereas Ellis Islander prefer social democracy, redistribution and speech restriction. And of course, these inter-European differences are dwarfed by the distances newer migrant groups and African-Americans sit at relative to the European cluster.
Deep assimilation of socio-political sentiments never happened, despite the success in making immigrants speak English. One of the few examples I can think of is Asian-Americans loving meritocracy more than white Americans, but they're otherwise still fairly different in their attitudes on most other things and that particular preference is obviously not the result of American cultural influence. If your concern is football matches and the consumption of burgers, sure, migrants are assimilating perfectly well, if it's the long-term cultural and political trajectory of the nation in a holistic sense, it's not. And if you happen to be a libertarian or love low taxes etc., it's an absolute disaster.
We need a better word for Latinos. Or no word and revert to Indian, Black, White. With some obvious complexity.
Florida Latinos have higher educational achievement and far lower support for welfare. They are a completely different population group than Texas/California Latinos. And Texas Latinos do seem sometimes very similar and some times very different than Cali Latinos.
A better demographic classification system would improve people’s models of society and immigration a lot.
For what it's worth, I reran the GSS query split by US census regions (state-level detail needs a permit, a 6-month waiting time and a cool 1.5k dollars) and the consistent tendency is that Hispanics in the West (goes as far east as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico) lean quite a bit more towards classic Republican policy positions than those elsewhere, but even they support the welfare state at much greater rates than North Eastern whites, who you'd expect to be the bluest of the blue (North Eastern Hispanics are also the most social democrat/leftist Hispanics).
The only area where Hispanics of any region get particularly close to whites is in their shared love of social security, which is the part of the welfare state that does by far the best in the "do you like the amount of spending" questions across all groups and ancestries. Otherwise, Hispanics fairly uniformly and with little apparent regional variation would like to see more social spending, more money spent on black people, less money on space, more on unemployment (here Hispanics from the West are a significant outlier, this is the only welfare-related question where they actually give a more right-leaning answer than whites nationwide, and they beat North Eastern whites by a significant margin) and higher taxes on the rich. EDIT: perhaps the best example of this: in the GSS Cubans are by far the most Republican non-European group, comparable in their party loyalty to Dutch- or Scottish-Americans, yet their attitudes on classical liberalism or the welfare state are more or less the same (and generally even more leftist!) as those of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans.
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I suppose you’d think of it as midwestern evangelical Christian culture. Country culture, the kind of thing you’d find if you visited a small midwestern or southern town of about 20K people.
I feel obliged to point out that Midwestern and Southern culture are not particularly alike within the broader context of American culture and neither is or has been the dominant/"standard" form of American culture, inasmuch as such a thing even makes sense. This is a standard that would marginalize: New Englanders, Texans, Northwesterners, Californians, Appalachians... in short, most Americans.
(Midwestern culture is, itself, significantly product of post-independence immigration, particularly German, Scandinavian, and Irish immigration, whereas Southern culture is mostly derivative of Anglo-Scots heritage with some significant West African influences.)
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Some would likely consider the ‘90s Affirmative Action push and some other programs as a strong attempt at getting full ADOS assimilation. When affirmative action failed then woke started since no interventions achieved the stated goal it must be that the other 85% have biases that holding back assimilation.
But now we are post-woke and genetic arguments are rising since the woke intervention also seems to have failed.
So maybe we actually have been trying assimilation and failed?
We aren’t trying. We don’t insist that immigrants learn English or anything at all about American culture. We don’t insist that they adapt to WASP ideals. For example, if we were to insist on Muslim assimilation, we would ban the hijab and other forms of Muslim dress. We would not allow for Muslim prayer times or build foot washes in public places to assist Muslims in praying. If we were insisting on Hispanic assimilation, then there wouldn’t be barios where several generations of Latinos have lived and barely any of them understand English.
I don’t disagree on those groups, but I do think 1990’s-2020’s we collectively did make a push to try and figure out how to assimilate ADOS more fully. That is partly why we elected Obama. Why we did affirmative action. Why we probably did things like have silly Air Traffic controller test for ADOS partly on some kind of reasoning if we just get them into whitish collar middle class seats that they will excel in the seat and assimilation occurs.
I think you could call it a priming the pump strategy of creating an ADOS middle class.
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