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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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