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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.
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.
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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