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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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There is truth to this, but I think it is overstated. America radically overhauled our immigration policy in the 1920s. The specifics were often silly, but one of the goals was to give time for immigrant communities to assimilate. And it worked!

This time is different, even for US specifically. Lets look at this graph from this pew article.

The current level of immigration in USA is almost reaching historical highs from 1900 as percentage of population (Sweden has even larger share of foreign born population than USA). The difference is that in 1900 the US fertility rate was around 4.0 while it is 1.7 now (coincidentally Sweden also has 1.7 fertility rate now) and even that fertility is already driven by immigrant population to significant extent. The level of immigration from 1980 till 2018 is absolutely unprecedented and it is probably about to continue growing. If this trend continues for another 2 or 3 generations the situation will be unlike any time in history.

Another thing is that I'd say capacity of the West to assimilate immigrants is at all time low due to two main reasons. First one is the technology - immigrants have unprecedent ability to communicate with people back at home. You can have daily videocalls and access to all the media you want as opposed to a few letters a year. Second reason is cultural: the multicultural push is exactly opposing to what was happening in USA after 1920ies where new mass media had explicit push to get rid of "hyphenated Americans" and have only Americans. The new ethos in the West is to do exactly the opposite: promote foreign cultures and demonize indigenous white population and their culture as uniquely racist and bad.

immigrants have unprecedent ability to communicate with people back at home

I'd flag that this isn't necessarily at odds with assimilation. Look at first-generation Filipino-Americans as an example - this is a group that has assimilated very well by most standards, but maintains strong connections to their home country. I think we need to be clearer about what assimilation means. To my mind, it's something like convergence of broad values, linguistic competence, and convergence to national medians for things like income, education, and rates of offending. Of course perfect convergence is unlikely due to deep-seated differences between populations, but approximate convergence (or getting better results than the median) is all that's required.

I don't think comparing immigrant assimilation between Europe and America is that sensible. The power of American culture is a zillion times stronger than almost any European one. There are immense economic and social opportunities for assimilating into the dominant culture in comparison. Western Europe lacks this almost completely. The natives themselves can barely justify their own cultural existence and mostly see themselves as "America with funny language and some quirks".