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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
A key point you're ignoring here is that such racialized rioting doesn't happen nearly as frequently in the US. When it does happen it also never comes from any sort of immigrant group that failed to assimilate---it's not at all fair to try to fit summer 2020 in the US under the same framework and use it to make arguments about assimilation. Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
There's an alternate framing of the narrative that actually supports the liberal point of view here (I think you're aware of this?). Yes, the French method of forcing assimilation is silly and doesn't work, but this doesn't mean that assimilation is doomed and will never happen. Rather, we already have a model of assimilation---race aware and everything---that works extremely well in the US. The French should copy this instead of sticking their heads in the sand about human nature and ignoring the necessity of actively combating the insidious power of irrational bias against people that look different.
They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.
There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.
This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.
Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.
Can you be more specific about what exact differences you see between East Africans in San Diego and the general population? The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. I'm also not going to count examples where East Africans do better than the general population since these would be examples of successful assimilation.
What are the non-superficial/non-appearance-based points where East Africans immigrants in San Diego are significantly worse than the general population?
So, I actually strongly disagree with this, because dress is the easiest way to signal to locals that you are eager to assimilate. It’s incredibly difficult to learn a new language as an adult, to change one’s moral assumptions and values, to pick up all the various folkways and pop-culture knowledge which distinguish locals from outsiders; it is not difficult at all to go to Goodwill or Salvation Army and purchase a $2 t-shirt and some secondhand jeans. If I were to emigrate to, say, Iran, the very first thing I would do is buy a couple of outfits to wear in public that would signal “I know I’m a guest in your country, and I’m making a basic effort to indicate that I respect your local customs and am trying to fit in.”
The fact that these East Africans immigrants do not adopt local modes of dress and comportment is not due to a simple oversight or laziness on their part; their women dress the way they do because of specific strong religious and cultural injunctions to do so. So, right off the bat, they wear their reluctance to assimilate right out on their bodies for everyone to see.
And it’s not like the foreign mode of dress is a false indicator, and if you talked to these women you’d find they’re just like us. They are far, far more devoutly religious than basically any native resident of this city, and their religion very obviously influences their behavior and their relationship to their families, their husbands, and strangers. These women are very quiet and submissive, at least to men, and often have large families of children, aged closely together.
And to be clear, I’m not even saying these are bad behaviors! I’m no feminist, and I wish that white American women would temper their outlook to become more like these woman in certain select ways. I think that conservative dress and a quiet demeanor around men are usually net-positive qualities, although I don’t think they should be enforced via domestic abuse, which as I understand is pervasive in the particular communities in question. But these all mark these people as very distinctly different, in ways that can’t be read as anything other than defiance, since they can easily look around then and see that the vast majority of people here dress a certain way, and it would be trivially easy to imitate that if one wanted to.
As to their children, they too - especially the daughters - tend also to be very religious; the first person I ever knew who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance was a classmate of mine in first grade, a child of Muslim East African refugees, who had a religious objection. (Again, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance is based - I don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance nowadays - but it’s certainly a strong indicator of not wanting to assimilate.) The boys seem less so, and my experiences with East African guys has been almost uniformly (though not entirely) negative. The first kid who bullied me in middle school was of East African descent, as was the first one who actually physically hit me for the first time in my life. Later on, the guy who robbed me in public was also a second-generation East African from the nearby East African neighborhood.
So, again, if your claim is that immigrants to the US are overwhelmingly eager to assimilate to local norms of behavior, then I think this particular community is a notable example of one who very visibly defies that assumption. We can argue about whether the ways in which they deviate from local norms are positive or negative, but the important thing is that they’re real and obvious.
Ok, I think we have two different standards for what assimilation means. To me, assimilation is just adapting well enough to the host country that you provide more benefits than harms. If I'm not mistaken, you seem to require something more: a level of conformity to the culture that's already there in as many ways as possible---dress, food, religion, etc.
Benefiting more than harming of course does not mean completely ignoring whatever the native culture is at the time. There's a good example brought up on SSC here.
I do count immigration breaking a norm like this as causing harm. Similarly, I would usually only count immigrants who learn English as fully assimilated.
Why do I think my standard for assimilation is better? The short answer is first that western countries, in particular and even more so the US, haven't had a homogenous culture to conform to for a very long time. Talking again about clothing, people aggressively refusing to conform through fashion is one of the most central things in American society---like how much do you remember from high school? Why does it matter whether they stand out by wearing all black and spiking their hair or by wearing traditional East African clothing?
I really think the article linked above is the right way to think about it---"western" culture is just a bunch of the most compelling parts of all cultures in the world mashed together into one plus some overarching "Noahide laws" to optimize it for assimilating others. I would in addition claim that this culture is superior to all others because it's the best we have for promoting technological and scientific development. Therefore it's good that this is what dominates the country and we shouldn't return to whatever there was before.
More specifically, extreme tolerance for non-conformity and diversity is one of the most important part of the Noahide laws that make it work. You need a broad spectrum of weird and unexpected, and possibly even threatening ideas for there to be innovative breakthroughs---simply put, innovation can't occur unless there are enough people that are actually thinking differently. I don't think it's a coincidence that Silicon Valley grew out of the most non-conformist part of the US. Any requirement that immigrants assimilate by conforming breaks this important part of the greatness of western culture.
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I for one look forward to it, since it's an argument a lot of anti-HBDers make that I haven't seen a good answer to.
If you want to read about turn-of-the century Italian homicide rates, Jeffrey Adler's First In Violence, Deepest in Dirt talks about the Italian community in Chicago which had murder rates upwards of 40/100k in the 1910s. This was a pattern that extended to other cities. IIRC it was Philadelphia where one-third of prisoners were of recent Italian background in the 1910s or 20s but I can't remember where I read that at the moment. Notably southern Italy where the great majority of Italian-Americans came from also had a very high homicide rate in the 19th - early 20th centuries, and when you remember that crime data in 1850s Italy was probably less than complete, it was likely even higher. Southern Italy of course no longer has homicide rates like this. They're still higher than in the north but it's like 0.7 vs 0.5 or something like that.
When I have tried to engage with the 'HBD' controversy in the past I always run against a wall of statistical and mathematical arguments that I don't think I'm smart enough to evaluate, but this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.
Coleman Hughes is a big advocate for the idea that African-American culture (as distinct from African-American DNA) is deficient in ways which makes young African-American men prone to criminality, and IIRC he's repeatedly drawn the parallel with mid-twentieth century Italian-Americans.
To be fair, that hypothesis isn’t incompatible with HBD. African American homicide rates are shockingly high by stable first world country standards and there can be multiple ingredients in that recipe.
Absolutely.
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Another argument is often the difference between Mexicans living in border towns between the US and Mexico. The same people, culture and genetics yet murder rates are often vastly different.
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Sure, I'll grant you that this seems to be evidence against HBD. However, I think it's still a highly effective theory, and certainly more parsimonious than bullshit like systemic racism and the like. The evidence, at least IMO, seems to be pretty net positive overall.
Maybe there's something interesting going on here, like the lead ban and decreased criminality in all demographics but didn't close the black-white gap. I'm waiting for that effort post myself!
Something I’ve never seen accounted for in discourse about the decline in criminality is the shift towards firearms using smaller bullets being the default available in America- when criminals used magnum revolvers and sawn-off shotguns their victims were less likely to survive than they were from a 9 mm round.
Not sure the difference is that significant for handguns even if it's only a single round -- and one should probably take into account that popular nines tend to hold ~3x as many rounds as a magnum revolver. (which would probably be on the expensive side for a fifties criminal anyways? The stereotypical crime gun from the era for me is a "Saturday Night Special" in .38, max)
Shotguns are probably still used quite a bit in crime? And if one were to replace a sawed-off shotgun with something with more gangster cred, that thing would probably be a MAC-10 or something, so I wouldn't really say it's necessarily less destructive.
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Criminals use larger bullets nowadays- most gunshot wounds pre 1990s were from small caliber pistols like a .25ACP or .22. Very few crimes were committed with a .45, which is very common today.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/GUIC.PDF
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https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2688536#
That's a fair point, but I don't know if historical records are that granular, but if anyone wants to dig into it I'll be looking on.
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I don’t see it. One, there was an exogenous shock in the reduction in lead exposure. Second, isn’t the problem somewhat self correcting in that the really violent often end up dying young and thereby decreasing the odds of passing on kids
I would assume that the kind of violent people with low inhibition and self control would be more likely to reproduce due to a propensity for unprotected sex.
Of course, that's the case today, but perhaps fertility rates were high enough back then that it wasn't significant.
And we have a very different idea of what really violent looks like now compared to back then, just to add another confounder to the mix.
Do we?
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Did you mean to respond to my comment?
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Latino crime rates have converged with white. This is old data and I know they updated it the past few years to show even a smaller gap.
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Latino+crime+rates
There might even be less age adjusted crime today in Hispanic populations than white.
I have a lot of concerns with crime but Hispanic crime doesn’t seem to be a real issue in America (education gaps are).
I don't find that at all convincing.
I spot checked this and El Paso is 80% hispanic and 3% black while Indianapolis is 50% white and 28% black. You can't look at that and use it as proof that hispanics and whites have similar murder rates. Plus hispanics tend to get filed under "white" in the statistics which makes the white numbers look worse than they otherwise would.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/demographics-cloud-optimism-black-violent-crime-decrease/
Found the other one.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/hispanics-and-white-criminality-are-converging.html
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Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.
The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.
The latter are a case of broad cultural assimilation except for sticking points that are unlikely to ever be sanded down in the near future, because of HBD or culture (I strongly think the former).
I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.
This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
Our east asian and european immigrants are also doing great. Don't need any advice for them, they took to the forceful assimilation well. I know a son of vietnamese immigrants, he was almost too patriotic. Funny, smart kid, but when he asked for the french flag to be flown on bastille day at the school, people rolled their eyes. He's a tank officer in the french army now (he's short). The french do not have a problem with this kind of frenchman, they love him. Whatever 'ethnic french racism' there is has never made him burn a school.
Maybe increase welfare, since the root cause for senseless destruction must be poverty and lack of chances? It's already higher than yours.
Are you sure you didn't reverse your reasoning process here? You first look at which groups do badly, and then assume their treatment must be terrible.
Consider the possibility that they were treated the same - they had access to free school and university, generous welfare, a passably functioning job market - , and yet still behaved in a dramatically opposite manner as the vietnamese and europeans.
I think the more interesting comparison is between MENA immigrants in France and Mexican/Central American immigrants in the US. The US also has significantly poorer, more violent, and less stable countries to the south that send a large inflow of unfiltered, not always legal immigration. However, these immigrant populations assimilate well and do not cause nearly the same problems as MENA immigrants in France. Clearly something is working with the American system that is not working in France. Even other places in Europe do better than France---Vienna seems to assimilate immigrants just fine for example.
One possible explanation is that the French idea that you can just by law declare that everyone is the same and then forget about race is hopelessly naïve. However much you claim everyone is equally French, some people are going to just look dramatically different. The way human nature is, unless you take serious effort to educate people about the reality of race and discrimination and actively pass explicitly race-based policies to counteract it, de facto, social discrimination is going to make it impossible for immigrants to assimilate no matter what the laws from up high actually say. However well the law treats them, civil society is not going to treat them well. Who cares if you have the same access to welfare and schooling if no one will hire you or rent you an apartment in a nice neighborhood? If the teachers are horribly biased against you when grading?
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I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.
You can get by with poor quality migrant stock if you filter aggressively enough, while the average African migrant might be net negative, restrict yourself to middle class or wealthy Nigerian Igbos and you're going to do a whole lot better, like the US does, and the EU can't.
I grant that they were poorer till the 60s and the end of segregation. However, I think it reflects worse on the ADOS than the US that they keep themselves segregated, or behave so badly that everyone runs away, as is the case with white flight. They certainly complain very hard when white people move back into the neighborhood, calling it gentrification.
Further, ADOS blacks don't exist in isolation, there are plenty of other ethnic groups that were dirt poor when they came to the US at a similar time frame, and yet managed to entrench themselves as productive members of society. Just off the cuff, Vietnamese, Japs and Chinese immigrants coming to the US before the 60s or even shortly afterwards were even worse off than the native AA population.
You inevitably end up with things as stupid as Structural Racism (or racism of the gaps as I prefer to call it) posited as explanations for the same, where a combination of HBD and culture are far more parsimonious. Especially when hundreds of billions in affirmative action have failed to close the gaps.
I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this, since ADOS are the only significant "involuntary immigrants" in the US, and the closest analogy, Native Americans, can't be called immigrants, even if they also do terribly as a group.
Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.
There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory".
The "US is better at assimilating" narrative is consistent with all the examples (the claim I made above was that the ADOS example doesn't contradict it). It also has theoretical justifications---the whole thing about immigrants in the US actually being given a fair chance since the country isn't blind to unfair biases against them, for example. The "populations are different" narrative still needs some sort of justification why Mexican/Central American immigrant populations in the US are actually meaningfully, intrinsically different from MENA immigrant populations in Europe beyond just "I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate".
Even as someone who thinks HBD is almost certainly true and major, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it explains all discrepancies, just most of them. Culture certainly plays a part, and bad attractors end up dragging countries down. Certainly, measures like strict enforcement of the law can make a massive difference, as El Salvador attests.
I don't really have a very strong position on whether the US or France does assimilation better, but the former seems to benefit from both a better quality of applicants and well as a more strict immigration process, though not very much more on the latter. I could be wrong, since I only have passing familiarity on the topic, and mainly regarding skilled immigration, which is far more relevant to my own interests.
Popperian notions of falsifiability are vastly inferior to a more nuanced Bayesian approach where there's no way to literally 100% prove or disprove anything as a fundamental mathematical impossibility unless you initialize an agent with malign priors of 1 or 0, making them immune to further evidence.
When I say "falsify", I use the standard of overwhelming evidence such that only motivated reasoning would argue otherwise, either via outright dishonesty or simply by making an error (perfectly possible when the mainstream only pushes one view and suppresses others). I prefer to be charitable and think of the latter when arguing with most Motte users; unless the issue is that we agree on all the facts but disagree on their implications, which is likely an unresolvable values difference.
Even if sociology is harder to study than the harder sciences, it's still possible to operate outside a state of total epistemic uncertainty.
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I think the Native Americans serve as a great second example. Forcefully immigrated? Not exactly. Forcefully moved and made part of the US? Definitely. The fact they also do poorly is a second data point in favor.
I feel bad for the poor bastards who were minding their business till they ended up a rarity in their own country. I'm sure they think that everyone else who came along later did a pretty terrible job of assimilating ;)
That being said, yes, I agree it supports the idea that HBD can overcome almost any well-meaning intervention that doesn't engage in eugenics to some degree.
On the other hand, there hasn’t been any serious effort to assimilate the African American population since the end of Jim Crow. And their culture is really bad.
I would point to groups that started out with poor cultures and self-domesticated, which would cover a lot of examples.
It certainly is the case that the stench of slavery and segregation provides a strong shield to dismiss any attempts at cultural uplift as being irredeemably racist and paternalistic, with guaranteed claims of the white man's burden.
I think such measures could do something to ameliorate the issue and are worth pursuing, but the evidence from the outcomes of black kids adopted out to white parents suggests that without some kind of eugenic intervention it's unlikely to close the gap. No reason not to try though!
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