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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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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.

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak.

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.

Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.

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.

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.

…if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities–Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso–to the those of the five whitest–Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates–10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles–50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole–has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent.

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/

The researchers, who released their findings in the current issue of Criminology, indicated that studies on black violent crime -- a crime that involves force or the threat of force -- often fail to account for the rise in the number of Hispanics in the U.S. Since there is no Hispanic category in the UCR and approximately 93 percent of Hispanics identify themselves, or are identified by law enforcement officers, as white, most arrests of Hispanics are added to white violent crime rates. The Hispanic rate tends to be higher than the white violent crime rate, but lower than the black rate.

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