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Seems pretty stupid. It wasn't Asian empowerment that put someone like Ketanji Brown-Jackson on the Supreme Court - it was good old-fashioned American racial patronage. The idea that black Americans are so incompetent that they can't partake in political patronage is just wildly uninformed and ignores the masterful play of figures like Jim Clyburn, who is likely responsible for Biden's promise to pick a black woman for the court, regardless of merit.
To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.
Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.
Actually no, average IQs among underclass/working-class Irish immigrants were substantially lower than WASP IQs - to say nothing of the rampant problems with predisposition to alcoholism prevalent among the Irish at the time - and these problems were substantially more pronounced among Southern Italian and especially Sicilian immigrants. The idea that the Irish and the Italians were every bit as capable and hard-working and freedom-loving as the native WASPs is a total fiction, only possible to believe given the intervening centuries during which the long and painful process of assimilating those populations into American society took place. The fact that many Irish and Italians intermarried into WASP families, thus reducing the genetic distinctiveness of those populations over time, does not mean that the populations were not originally genetically distinct, nor that they did not originally have significant hereditary differences which contributed to differential life outcomes between those groups.
Ok, so modern immigrants from Italy or Ireland will not have those mixed genes, and should be subjected to the same expectations of criminality and incompetence?
Keep in mind that in the cases of both Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, and Italian immigration around the turn of the century, the people coming to America were not a totally representative sample of the native populations of the source countries. The waves of Irish who flooded into America after the Potato Famine were destitute peasants. Subsistence farmers. “Shanty Irish”. The Sicilians who came over to America were coming from arguably an even more backward and violent society than that. Selection effects are very real.
And yes, there is in fact a substantial native Irish criminal class today, involved in drug trafficking and petty crime. An Irish person from that stratum of their society would indeed be expected to be a highly suboptimal addition to American society. Ditto for an unemployed Sicilian goombah. There are very substantial cultural and genetic/ancestral differences between people from different parts of Italy; a fair-haired descendant of Milanese Lombards is, on average, going to display reliably different traits than a heavily Mediterranean-descended Neapolitan or Sicilian. (And both will be different from a Sardinian.)
Underclass Europeans usually don’t get to immigrate to America; even Albanian refugees and Moldovan brides are somewhat selected for being a cut above average compared to their social stratum(granted that stratum may well be Albania). So modern Irish and Italian immigrants are probably highly successful for the same reason Nigerian immigrants are.
Modern immigrants, yes. But OP’s question was implying that there was no important dissimilarity between 19th-century European immigration and 21st-century European immigration. The modern American immigration regime for non-border-jumping legal immigrants is indeed very selective and expensive, and for that reason I would expect an Irish or Italian immigrant in 2023 to be highly dissimilar to an impoverished Ellis Island immigrant.
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