You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are. The author of the article you linked to also exhorts the Somali immigrant community to not engage in crime.
> because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.
History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
It's clear that the national interest is in accepting skilled immigrants who migrate legally and are able to integrate fully into the host society, a la Teddy Roosevelt's dropping of the hyphen. It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
> various European nations [...] some immigrant groups
American Jew here, who spent years living in France and Spain. I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.
One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.
When the US ghettoized Chinese economic migrants, American politicians claimed they could never integrate. And yet the Chinese-American population is well integrated and hugely successful since the host society allowed it. Same with Jews in America, and increasingly with Hispanics.
Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Subtle topic. In France there were waves of italians and spaniards in the early 20th, it went bad for a short while and then became a non issue apparently (being born in the 80s, these groups were never causing trouble in the slightest). Sharing history probably helps too.
I also never felt any issue regarding Jewish people but considering this was after ww2 .. nobody would really say a thing either, but personally they never displayed anything noteworthy society wise. another non issue
Now it's African, northern African populations being at the forefront of news, but personally i had many more issues with them (and i'm partially brown so the chances of them thinking I'm too different are lower). regularly they displayed very low morals, aggressiveness, sudden high fanaticism toward religious principles they didn't really grasp, worse behavior in school.
My mother knew people from Asia (Vietnamese, Cambodians) fleeing from war, with no resources, not speaking french, nothing in common with Europe, they mentioned seeing some racism, yet they too ended up being a non issue. They end up being as the cliche quiet-asian-1st-in-class kid and that's the end of it.
It's possible France or other European countries have some underlying, hard to describe, notion of integration. It's less economical and more about mentality ? Maybe except UK, where it's often said that anybody will to work would rapidly integrate. I still can't say.
> And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).
It's not that I even necessarily disagree with what you're saying but unfortunately your comment is 80% demagoguery and 20% substance.
> Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
Possible different population samples that don't overlap as much? By and large (unless you're crossing the Mexican border I guess...) immigrating to the US has been significantly harder than to the EU even if you're educated/relatively high skilled. The US can afford to be much more picky.
> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
There are 2x more Jews in France than before WW2? Guess from where most of the threats/attacks towards them are coming? (hint: not the host society).
As a Swede, we have always been very bad letting foreigners in. Most, even otherwise liberal and well educated, have been low key racist. One part has been that anyone not speaking perfect Swedish has been seen as bit stupid. Having a foreign sounding name has made it much harder to get to an interview. Imagine growing up with hard working parents with engineering or medical degrees working as cleaners because no one wants to employ them because of their names or the way they speak. Would you be motivated to study or work hard? The only places where you feel welcome are in the mosques or in a gang.
What gives me a bit of hope is that this seem to be quite rapidly changing, at least in part of society. I have been working at a company in central Stockholm where none! of about 100 employees had even immigrated parents. I’m working in a large company right now where some departments still are 100% native Swedes, but other, that see what a waste it is to not use all this talent, employ 50% or more first or second generation of immigrants.
To be honest, it's also the quality of migrants that Sweden receives. The migrants joining gangs or getting radicalized in Sweden are primarily ones who arrived as asylum seekers, usually without much language and marketable job market skills, and with conservative cultural background that can be a burden. This is a big contract to the United States, which doesn't receive anywhere near as many refugees (adjusted to its size), and is generally more picky about migrants.
The welfare system doesn't work well with integration either. If all that is available to you are bad jobs due to your lack of job market / language skills, why work if welfare pays almost the same?
I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
>I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
As a (technically) second generation migrant born and raised I doubt this. This is a sentiment mostly only shared by isolated liberal wing of the society, who probably don't really mingle with expat population beyond surface chatter.
And it's not just some racism sentiment but as the post you replied to insinuate, general xenophobic / supremacist sentiments. I even know other (white) Europeans with great education and jobs getting sick of this place because just how condescending and unfriendly people in general are, for petty things such as unperfect Swedish. (Native English speaking migrant being the only exception)
>I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
Tbh I doubt it. If it's anything like German society, which is incredibly insular, just being non-German is enough to make you unwelcome.
I am a British immigrant in Germany and I can vouch for how impossible it is to integrate into these northern European societies, if the rest are anything like Germany. I tick all the boxes of what German boomers would want in a "Good Immigrant" (white, educated, from western Europe, speaks German, good job), but it doesn't help.
I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.
I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.
And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.
I - a white German - got verbally attacked in the subway of Berlin by a man because I looked somehow foreign to him... So even being white and German sometimes doesn't help... Being from the wrong side of the village can be bad enough.
Integration is hard - I recently went to an intergration event at a local church - almost no Germans there - and also the different foreign communities didn't really interact with each other. E.g. there's severe hatered between the different groups of Turkish people.
I think there are a lot of outsiders in German society - ethnic integration is hard. Maybe Special interest groups - like Computer Meetups or Maker-Spaces can help with Integration into a new Clan?!
I really think you're right. Actually I do truly believe everyone suffers under the prevailing German attitude towards social contact and human interaction. It's just worse for immigrants, because we've even more outsiders and often visibly so.
While being an exchange student in Asia I met an Austrian girl studying in Germany. Her best friend was Iranian-German, born and raised in Germany. When they both tried to apply for renting places close to Uni, several times her Iranian-German friend was ignored by the land lords.
Even though the Austrian girl had heavy accent and technically being the migrant, her "germanic" name and white face gave her access to the most basic thing:housing; something a German born Iranian (studying engineering, well educated and mannered), will struggle to have. One of the landlord she met, an old lady, even explicitly said she was happy "a German" applied and she felt she would take care of the place better.
Similar discrimination exist in Japan, where I lived. All my European expat friends complained about how they struggle getting apartments because landlord silently decline based on their foreigner name.
Very few of them even want to BELIEVE the above Austrian girls story. The common reply is always questioning the story. Maybe some other reason, it's an anecdote, how can she be sure. (when the Austrian girl tell her German friends same questioning occur)
At the core of it the unfriendliness of northern Europe + Germany is a double punch: you're often silently discriminated, and when you try to voice it, you're often gaslighted.
At least in USA or other English speaking places those voices are allowed to be voiced, without condemnation (people will debate it, but we won't even get there for places like Germany or Sweden )
Yeah this is extremely common, surnames are probably the single most important thing in Germany when it comes to finding quality housing. Actually the housing market in Germany is really bad, somehow seemingly even worse than the British one, albeit in different ways. All the Germans I know live really well, because finding somewhere to live is more about connections ("Vitamin B", Genossenschaft, friend/colleague "giving" you their contract/flat) and being German (so you're not filtered based on your surname) than anything else. Of course, if you're an immigrant then you're unlikely to have connections, and it's unlikely your dad signed you up to a Genossenschaft 20 years ago.
Some Germans may like to think of Germany as a country of immigrants, but it just isn't, regardless of how many live here.
I was blamed of being "too white" in the australian outback by british descendants. And quote "should go back to your country" which I would have done anyway.
Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists. I really like Brits, but just if they stay on their Islands. And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys from India.
Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
In my 2500 souls german home village live people from more than 40 nations. I never heard negative comments about them from one of the natives. But the shithole you live in of course may vary.
Aren't you just proving my point, though? Your post is objectively xenophobic.
> Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists
Funnily enough I've never been anywhere where our trashy British tourists go (why would I?). So actually I don't know what they're like, but I've heard very bad things. I've also heard even worse things about the Dutch, though.
> And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys
Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead, so I am not sure they're in a position to support you at all. Having said that, I wonder what the all the dead Europeans and Jews murdered by Germans would think of Germany.
> But the shithole you live in of course may vary
I live and work in Hamburg.
>Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
Yes, because of how the majority ethnic German population treated them and continues to treat them. It's a very racist country. That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me. Thank you for the cultural exchange.
I think it's great you're engaging in casual anglophobia and xenophobia, it just perfectly demonstrates how xenophobic Germany is, it's such a nice example.
I have a funny story, my grandfather actually was German and fought for the Nazi German Empire in WW2 and moved to the UK afterwards. He used to cry about how much worse the English were and how unfair it all is that the Nazi German Empire (your Nazi ancestors) is vilified compared to the English. Will you bring up the Boer War now? He used to do that too. Anyway it's all very on brand for a German to give off pretty familiar national socialist vibes. Takes me right back to my childhood trying to navigate interactions with that autistic old man :')
Funnily enough, they do say that German society is like one where everyone is autistic. It all adds up!
Actually your post is really useful, thanks. It's a perfect display of how so many Germans respond to criticism of their country by immigrants who live there.
Reader: never let anyone tell you Germans aren't nationalistic. They are as nationalistic as anyone, they are simply more subtle about it and eschew overt symbolism.
>I doubt your objectivism.
Yes, to truly understand the racism of Germany, I have to witness someone who I do not give a shit about being victimised. If I care about that person, then it doesn't count and I am not allowed to form an opinion. Lol.
> Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).
If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.
Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.
That's where the integration effort stops.
Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.
> state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...).
No it doesn't. Refugees are placed in municipalities all over Sweden but most choose to move to the big cities as soon as they can and end up in these districts because they are the cheapest.
> slightly elevated crime rate.
Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
> That's where the integration effort stops.
Simply not true. There are oodles of integration efforts all over Sweden at many levels; public projects, local initiatives and on top of that immigration heavy areas gets more public funding than average for schools, after-school activities, park/street cleanings, etc.
> Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society.
That's because Swedish is a small language and most professionals don't plan on staying.
Most Swedish professionals speak English on a native speaker level and most large Swedish companies has English as the official corporate language.
In my experience most non-English speakers that comes to Sweden spend their efforts on becoming fully proficient in English while the English speakers are delighted to find that they can use English everywhere in society.
Learning Swedish has a very low priority and after a couple of years most expats grows tired of the cold, darkness, taxes, low salaries, etc.
In my opinion, refugees should be spread out and placed among neighbors who are willing to interact positively with them and invite them to stuff so they can integrate, and NOT allowed to relocate their residence for 5-10 years. That will be better for the country. Beggars can’t be choosers, they’re happy to get asylum.
How to enforce that: fine whoever sells/rents to them outside where they are supposed to live. And threaten to deport them if they move without the years passing or showing they’ve integrated / learned the language / culture etc.
Obviously, exceptions can be made for reasons of safety or being closer to a job they got, but then the same procedure should be followed (spread out and surrounded by neighbors willing to help integrate them).
They should also have access to resource to accelerate the cultural integration, like meetups and schools etc.
I like the idea of setting an immigration quota based on how many meighborhoods overwhelmingly vote to welcome immigrants, and then requiring the immigrants to live in those neighborhoods as a condition if their immigration status.
If the immigrants enrich the community, those who welcomed them get the enrichment.
If the immigrants bring crime and disease, those who welcomes them get the crime, disease, and decreased property values.
I love solutions that work whether my views are right or wrong.
May I steal that for part of my political platform?
Sure. It sounds very bottom-up and libertarian, the kind of libertarian I am is exactly this thing … making a new bottom-up system with software, giving people the tools to self-organize, get critical mass in various local areas, and then using the new tech to bring about change by working with the old top-down structures.
Facebook and Uber and AirBNB did it in social networking and transportation and housing, respectively, starting in colleges and cities.
I am doing it for all kinds of things, and sometimes selling it to political campaigns such as I did with https://qbix.com/yang2020.pdf but that is not really my goal, just to help some politicians was never my goal
I put out a few apps like Groups on iOS and so far we attracted a million small community leaders in 100 countries, who have our app on their phones. So the first phase (bottom-up) is under way
Years I go I met with Rohingya Project guys and working together to create the R Coin, Identity and Academy on decentralized platform for the Rohingya refugees:
https://rohingyaproject.com/platform/
Now this year for the first time, we got a VC (Balaji’s fund) leading our round for Network States. Balaji is a big proponent of these (kind of like Estonia’s e-residency), his fund also has Naval Ravikant, Fred Wilson and others on their investment commitee… basically a lot of people involved in Web3 (CoinBase, CoinList, etc.)
So if you’re serious about doing the first part of the solution (software) I recommend you can do it in software, and working on the ground with small towns and neighborhoods. I already have a platform doing just that, so if you want to do it locally, we can reach out about doing something together. We’re eventually looking to go to every part of the world, but currently we’re at a stage of just doing local pilots. Look at my profile and you can email me.
And/or come to the Singapore conference on September 22nd and let’s all meet and discuss there in person :)
But PS: our platform isn’t only about resettling refugees, although it is a big part. It’s about dating, job boards, local currencies, and much more. I think that if Donald Trump and Co get into office again, there will be a huge “crypto summer” but we need to use crypto for actual applications like the one I mentioned, with global donation crowdfunding and transparency and benefitting the stateless people on the ground, instead of crazy ponzi schemes round 4 LOL.
Do it! Start-up meet-ups and find a way to make the labor, especially the idle labor, more productive. This is entreprenuerism. It is also hard and then there are the costs--who pays?
> Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
Citation needed? You haven't provided a single citation for any of the wild claims you've made.
It’s not the state that put the immigrants there, but outside those areas it’s almost impossible to find something to rent, and as an immigrant without a steady income it’s kind of impossible to buy anything.
I should be clear... I'm not talking about Nordic countries regarding Jews. Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are considered heroes in this regard, and the historical analogies to the rest of Western Europe don't hold. There was no history of ghettoization or discrimination there. I am not applying my criticism there.
It should be said that the pre-WW2 Jewish population of Sweden was miniscule, but that Swedes took great personal risks to save these refugees from a culture they did not know.
The rise in antisemitic attacks in France, conducted entirely by Muslim immigrants, is a feature of the weakness of the French pluralist/secularist and legal state which again appears to be failing to integrate new arrivals into its Enlightenment ideals. One hopes Sweden doesn't fall into the same trap. But my gripe is about integration, and historically Sweden has not had to deal with anything on the scale of what is happening now.
I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.
Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.
I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.
However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.
This is a fair take. And my experience with Arabs who are well off and relatively secular in France and Spain, and even more so Maghrebis who quietly identify as Berbers, tracks with what you mean as far as their integration and acceptance. But I did live in Avignon for awhile and saw some of the worst of the well-meaning welfare state in action, just outside the city walls.
I'm not blaming the character of the French any more than the character of the Arabs, I just think the system is not built in a way like America where assimilation is the goal of either party.
If you don't mind, I'll chime in with an American perspective. America is itself not a perfect case on immigration. Beyond high-profile recent developments under Trump: per our history of official, state-led segregation - within living memory, and certainly within the memory of much of our existing municipal and physical infrastructure, and which famously was, in part, a model for what the Third Reich aimed to achieve - the road to assimilation for the individuals and populations seeking it is not of equal length and equally unimpeded for everyone.
Being educated helps a lot. Being wealthy helps a lot. Speaking English helps a lot. Being white helps a lot. Not having these attributes is not a deal-breaker (we DID manage to elect a black president), but they do significantly effect how someone and their children might be able to access the greater community, education, jobs, and more, and particularly outside of the immigrant community they might belong to. This is exacerbated by the state of our geography: America is big, and spread-out, and was built in its current form with an eye toward advantaging car-ownership and ethnic/economic segregation. It is possible to come to this country as someone who is not American, become American, and then become fabulously successful as an American, but it's not a given, and there are often headwinds.
It's a difficult problem. We shouldn't despair because our governments haven't been able to tackle it. It's one worth continuing to try at because the alternatives (terrorism and internecine violence on one end, a form of genocide on the other) are horrible.
I feel you are a bit harsh in this last comparison, this poor Perl codebase doesn't deserve such a stigmatization as to low it down at the level of systematic failure constructed by several generations of incompetent wannabe elite of the country regardless of continuous demonstration of total inability to take a single decision that make sense in regard to the goals of the mandate they are supposed to fulfill.
At least no one can pretend that Larry was missing the skills to handle the job, Perl community neither laked dedication on par with the flowing resources, and what they build still make stand a significant part of the internet diligently.
When looking at how wealthy democracies integrate immigrants the English speaking countries are dramatically more successful across all the standard objective metrics like crime rates or income compared to the native population. So Sweden isn't relevant.
Is the UK that particularly better than all the countries on the continent? And comparing US/Australia/NZ with Europe in the regard isn't exactly fair (they are much better at controlling and picking who can or can't come).
US specifically already has extremely high crimes rates (compared to most developed countries) which might overshadow any effect immigrants might have.
The US has very weak employment checks and it's trivial to illegally work ones life here without having to commit any other crimes.
We also have weaker regulations that allow you to start a business with basically $20 and a pressure washer, and you can legalize it with a foreign passport. The English speaking countries generally have lowest barriers to start a business which is a good release valve when you can produce value but racists won't hire you (customers will at low enough price).
I suspect illegals and foreigners in general don't cause so many problems here because its easier to survive helping us than hurting us.
I agree there's near infinite confounding factors. But I think the correlation is striking enough that it's relevant to this conversation especially considering that the post I'm replying to cites only non-Anglosphere countries.
This isn't adjusted by immigrant education/background though?
e.g. in the UK a slightly higher proportion of foreign born residents have tertiary degrees, in France it's the opposite (especially if we look at Île-de-France).
Australia especially is extremely picky (e.g. 60% (immigrants) vs 40%(native))
And I assume there might be other significant cultural/class/etc. differences. e.g. in the US 53% of all Arab-Americans are Christian. I can't quickly find any statistics but I assume in Europe the ratio is very different. Not saying that this specific example necessarily has an impact but differences in other characteristics might.
Generally English speaking countries tend to have and advantage at attracting highly educated/productive immigrants presumably both due to language and other cultural, economic and social factors. It's not at all surprising that their children do a better than average.
You may throw a Godwin point as introduction, it doesn't change the fact that some groups indeed doesn't integrate well into France. And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)
Everywhere in Europe that welcomed Jews, their neighbors attacked them whenever the Plague came around, blaming them for poisoning wells. To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century. So you are supporting the point that village rumors led to a situation of permanent exclusion for Gypsies.
> To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century
That seems like a bizarre claim... If anything the attacks, discrimination etc. would have encouraged assimilation. Voluntary conversion to Christianity wasn't particularly uncommon either (forced violent conversion also occurred). Even when national governments started expelling their entire Jewish populations staying and getting to keep all of your property ussually was an option. Yet most chose to leave rather than convert.
Yes, converted Jews might have faced discrimination and even violence (this depended a lot on the willingness to abandon your old customs and practices and varied hugely based on time and place, but seemingly became a bigger issue at the very end of the middle ages) but ussually they managed to more or less fully assimilate in a few generations.
I see where you're coming from, because it sounds logical to someone who isn't part of an oppressed minority. But for the past 2500 years, religious Jews have felt threatened by the real possibility that less religious Jews would succumb to the easy life of assimilation that came with Helenization, Romanization, Germanization, etc. There is indeed a core that won't succumb to conversion in exchange for a place in the prevailing society, which is why Jews still exist in societies that have made it the slightest bit difficult for Jews to integrate.
But contrast that with, for instance, Kaifeng[0]. The biggest fear of Jewish believers is that they will encounter a society like America or China which swallows their talents whole and integrates them fully.
Put another way, it is a fear right now in segments of the Jewish community that without antisemitism, Jews would cease to exist. And there is a truth to this borne out by history. In Jewish communities it is practically taken for granted that if we had been treated equally, most of us would have given up our identity ages ago.
Have you considered that perhaps if the idea of integration itself is considered abhorrent by a culture then that culture will very rarely be accepted anywhere?
Or to put it another way: if everywhere one goes smells like feces, maybe one should check their own boots
They want the benefits of being part of the community without being part of the community
I am making the point - and I'm not the first to make it - that the lack of acceptance is the driver. From the outside of an ostracized community, it might make sense that people would choose to quit that community to avoid ostracization. Some few do. But the majority will cling more tightly together as a result of the external pressure.
For an example, take a look at the history of the Cagots in France, who were (are) ethnically identical to other French but due to their psychological treatment and ostracizatìon were forced into tight communities for survival.
This can happen to any arbitrary group of people sufficiently singled out for any reason. A similar case exists in Japan. Then if that group remains together for fear of the abuse they receive, the broader population says "they want to be separate".
Also, your shit on boots metaphor is highly offensive, but I'm answering you as if you aren't a bigot. Sometimes the reason people end up as bigots is that no one treated them with respect and gave them complete answers.
Cagots didn't really have an option of assimilating besides moving to a different region, that's what was special about them. Jews on the other hand ussually would do reasonably fine after converting. Of course it varied a lot by location/period and belonging to a group or a specific community was very important in premodern societies. You'd lose your entire support network and while you might be lucky enough to live in a place were other Christians wouldn't be throwing rocks at you you'll probably never be fully accepted (your grandchildren etc. might).
It's not inversion, but not going for a root cause far enough. You are of course right. Jews were not allowed to pursue most/all "honorable" professions.
Jews were merchants engaging in transactional relationships with farmers, which in an agragian society instills a level of hatred due to being fundamentally opposite to the reciprocal relations that farming neighbours participate in.
Jews were not allowed to own land or engage in trades. What they did have was an ethnic/family presence across national boundaries, which placed a few of them in a unique position to negotiate on behalf of their lords and kings. This led to a condition where a small fraction of Jews became essential to European diplomacy, and subsequently became movers of money. That plus the Christian ban on moneylending and the need for liquidity nonetheless.
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.
I only learned recently about usury and the relationship with Jewish groups and their own history. The interplay between local powers needing money at different periods... It was all very fascinating. Especially how simple moral principles (lending for interests) could ripple so far.
Funnily enough it's not even that hard to 'become aware'. Start with the Wikipedia page on the Second World War, for instance, for a blockbuster entry to the topic.
The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews (with the Romani a close second). Pretty much every European power has evicted, massacred, initiated pogroms, or otherwise persecuted Jews. The trend continues today.
Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic, because that's denying a group of people their homeland or Urheimat. That is classic genocide, by the way.
> The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews
Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.
> because that's denying a group of people their homeland
History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.
I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Not every Jew identifies as Israeli and by claiming that Israel represents all Jews on this planet you are taking away their agency.
Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.
It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
They didn't say that one country represents all Jews, they said Jews have a right to their homeland. You made the point that Germans have 3 homelands, and really I suppose you could add Alsace and the Sudetenland and Gdansk and some bits of Denmark if you were ambitious about creating more living space. Does the existence of any of those take away from the agency of people who identify as German?
Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
The Germanic Urheimat is in North Germany / Southern Scandinavia, not the Urals, and separated from proto-Indo-European on the order of 4000 years ago, not 2000 years ago.
> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.
In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.
That is not what I said; this is a strawman. I said, 'Jewish people deserve sovereignty over their ancestral homeland' (i.e. Zionism). This is completely orthogonal to 'Israel represents all Jewish people'.
That being said...
> It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
I don't think that's crackpot at all. What's wrong with an ethnic state representing its people's and diaspora's interests? Why do you think countries today issue their citizens with passports? Why do some countries give even non-citizens a fast-track path to citizenship or at least an indefinite multiple-entry visa, provided they're of a certain ethnicity?
A plurality of countries today are ethnic states, by the way, including essentially every European state. I am very happy to say that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany absolutely represent Germans as a whole.
As an addendum: printed on the inside front cover of my A1 German textbook was a map of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Make of that what you will.
So many people would have "rights to their ancestral homeland" then.... History is full of conquest and expulsions and genocide. Arabs and Celts were both driven out of what is now my country, at points over a millennium ago. Shall their descendents be entitled to claim part of it as an ethnostate for themselves? Of course not, for that would be ridiculous.
Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.
a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here:
https://arielche.net/Lydie.html
)
but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".
Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.
I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
The opposite. Money lenders were non-christians, because Christians were forbidden from charging interest. It is also easier to excommunicate a money lender if they aren't a fellow Christian, so the arrangement was actually to the benefit of Christians.
What you are doing is "affirming the consequent". Most Jews were working normal jobs (obviously excluding the ones they were legally barred) like everyone else.
not all jews though. Most of them were, I believe, middle class workers. You can see that from the meaning of their last names in the places they originate from.
Sorry but I don't even need rumors about gypsies, as a kid some were schooled during months of winter, and they were .. surprisingly creative when it comes to harming you (and I'm being polite here). I know gypsy culture is also bringing beautiful music, and some are hard working people touring the country during the summer, but really you don't need to go far to have evidence of issues still existing to this day.
If you did, then you would know that it is not about race, it is about culture. Gypsy culture is extremely toxic and more akin to gangs than to normal society.
Do you like violent drug gangs? If not, why? Are you racist to them?
I'm saying it was an anonymous story, lacking verifiable detail, spread in a public forum. Whether it's your personal truth or not is irrelevant to the fact that it's a rumor by definition.
Are you scared of definitions? Do you feel like dictionaries are written to gaslight you? Don't blow it out of proportion.
> And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.
> You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.
America also just have way fewer refugees. Seems like it's around 60k a year, so less than 0.02% of the population per year. Sweden, for example, has had around 26k refugees per year (the last 10 years), which is around 0.2% of its population. At its peak Sweden almost took on a full 1% in one year.
Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.
The illegal migrants coming to the US know they have to work if they wish to eat. Meanwhile, coming to Sweden has been just a ticket to easy life, where you get free housing and money, but will be probably excluded from the job market unless you learn the language and get several years of education.
So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.
It sounds from your comment that you are from Europe, but if you visit the US, you should travel to the south, find some white conservatives, and discuss black people. They will make astonishingly similar points to the ones you brought up, you'll find you and they have a lot in common.
For what it's worth, I'm a nonwhite immigrant living in a Deep South state, with experience living in more liberal coastal metropolitan areas. You will find that whites and blacks are much better integrated with each other in the south, and that racism runs deeper up north. For example, it's widely known among black professional athletes that the most racist city to play in is Boston.
> scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago
Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. Any general sentiment from that time period is lost, and the best your scholar can do is project the lens of the present onto sources from the past. To be fair, all histories are done that way.
That's not true. The best scholars can do is figure out the lens the past sources were using, given the historical record about the time period. Take for example contemporary scholarship and the historical Jesus. It's now understood Jesus was a 2nd Temple apocalyptic Jew. Something nobody is today, since 2nd Temple Judaism and it's sects were replaced by Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity went in it's own direction.
> It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.
My understanding is that pre-WW2 Europe you had community groups that dealt with their people. So in a Jewish neighborhood, you had powerful Rabbis or other religious leaders that dole out law. These unofficial community leaders were given a lot of autonomy as to how to deal with their subjects. You see hints of that today in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you have un-offical private police [0]. I don't think its as simple as saying they were excluded or ghettoized.
But that begs the question, what does it mean to be a country? Some people think its just magical land, like you step onto the country, get a piece of paper that says you're from that country and that's it. I think every country has a cultural identity. Much less so for America, since its the only country I know of where you can call yourself American despite not being born there or have any blood relatives from there but no one would bat an eye. But even there, some things are anti-American. Things like women being second class citizens (e.g. women can't drive or are forced to cover up). Or lawlessness (e.g. riding illegal scooters the wrong way down the street).
I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If you want to treat women like second class citizens or don't have respect for private policy or rule of law, you shouldn't be allowed to come to law abiding Western country.
>> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there
But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough.
And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.
> Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French.
disagree with this as a French person.
That "ethnic nationalist core" is the French equivalent of Trump supporters who say "America is a white (anglo) Christian nation".
the country currently known as France was originally Celtic Gaul, which was then conquered by Romans, then by various Germanic tribes, most notably the Franks who gave the country it's current name, and didn't really unify until fairly late. Even to this day, you'll find people in Brittany identify more as 'Breton' then French sometimes, despite the efforts of the French state to kill that local identity in the late 19th century. We're a nation of bastards, and always have been.
You'll have sad, sorry people on the far right who conjure up some imaginary ideal of a "true, ethnic French character", but it's like the KKK members in America talking about being 'true Americans'. It's a fallacy.
The people with high levels of melanin with parents that arrived in the country less than 50 years ago playing for our national soccer team are, at least to my mind, just as French as my father whose family lived around Saint-Etienne for the past 300+ years, even if some of them act like the equivalent of "that girl from Jersey shore saying she's Italian because her last name is Spaghetti despite not actually speaking a word of Italian and having never been there" sometimes. :)
I think it’s true that people in Europe feel that welfare is part of the problem here. In the Netherlands for example, one of the main right wing talking point is that refugees are given free social housing which could have gone to locals that are often on waiting lists for years.
In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.
Er...
speaking as a liberal American, this is a wild oversimplification. Housing is not a zero-sum resource. For one thing, to be a bit cheeky, when the white settlers stole the land from the Indians there was absolutely no housing at all. When my grandparents arrived in the US in the 1920s they lived in a tenement with one bathroom per floor. My grandfather saved his money as a tailor and a bartender and eventually built modern apartment buildings. If you harness the ingenuity and resourcefulness of immigrants they will build!
This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.
I agreed with most of what you posted, but you have a misconception about these "welfare states". The immigrants end up on welfare because they are not allowed to participate in the economy. Why? Partly because of bureaucracy, and partly, one might say also because of other reasons: protectionism, discrimination, ...etc.
I think we're saying very much the same thing. Welfare to immigrants in Europe has become a tool to compensate for other elements which make finding work or gaining advancement difficult; so it is a subsidy meant to protect "native" jobs by isolating the foreign labor force. It serves a double purpose to prevent the integration of new arrivals. Worst of all, it attracts people who think they don't need to work. All of these things can be true at the same time.
<< Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up.
Uh. I want to hope that this is just a oversimplification intended to get a reaction.
Yes, US does have real issues that it needs to address those in order to make social mobility reasonably attainable. Arguably, it is a lot harder to "make it" now.
I am just an anecdote here, but, I am a first generation immigrant. I have a house, a dog and a partner. Also next week, I am taking my vacation and buying a vette ( well, I scheduled a test drive -- didn't mentally commit to buying yet ). I do not consider myself a second class citizen. I am not rich, but I can't say I am poor either. My kid is starting school ( private, public one is not great here -- ok, but not great ).
I honestly do not think I would have been able to do the same in the old country.
I absolutely accept that I might not be the norm and the current version of capitalism needs to be reined in, but, honestly, if you do want to drive that point, I think you need a better argument.
That index is confounded by wage compression, which is high in Nordic countries and almost non-existent in the US, and small countries with limited economic diversity. Importantly, "social mobility" is only weakly related to the ease with which you can materially improve your economic situation, which is what most immigrants are after.
I don't think it is controversial at all to say that the US has much higher economic mobility than Europe.
If only. The Nordic countries solve the problem with a very easy trick: They’ve lowered the ceiling by a tremendous amount!
There’s a reason people do their startups in the US, there’s a reason the smart Nords move to the US rather than the other way around.
There’s a reason Y Combinator is American.
I encourage you to try innovating in Europe (or just the Nordic countries). Please prove me wrong, for the sake of Europe.
To be fair, it’s certainly not _impossible_ to move up, but it’s relatively much harder, which is the point.
eh... Germany, Netherlands, even France... Switzerland probably... all those places you'll have bright young hardworking people from Spain or Portugal or Tunisia moving there, getting tech jobs, and finding financial/material success. In many cases becoming citizens so their kids can have access to that life without jumping through a bunch of hoops for visas.
America is totally a place where a hardworking, intelligent immigrant can become fairly wealthy (assuming no catastrophic bad luck, ie. getting shot because the second amendment says that everyone should have a full-auto assault rifle), but it does not have a monopoly on that :)
Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "assault rifle". Over half of all gun deaths are suicides, so even those numbers are inflated if what you want to know is "how worried do I need to be about dying because the 2nd amendment allows assault rifle ownership?"
It's not the case in Germany, to get into a management role you generally need to be German. Also, the housing market is completely broken with all the good stock in the hands of white German boomers on old rental contracts paying a 1/3 what immigrants pay.
Germany is not a land of opportunity, it is a land of relative comfort, with laws and regulations in place to protect the lives of German boomers. Immigrants will never go far in Germany, but they will be relatively comfortable.
> I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there.
If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world.
The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey.
Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled.
Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.
I agree that regimes or groups that determine citizenship along the lines of vague "values" are always fascist or authoritarian, but that's why I delineated the "values" I was talking about and restricted them to the same ones embodied by the French Republic. In responding to the case I was trying to differentiate between those vagueries of ethnic background or shared religious "morals", and the few common things enshrined in our Constitution which most Americans would agree on and which virtually all asylum-seekers are seeking as the prerequisites to individual liberty and prosperity for their families.
So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.
It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values
Many Gypsies do integrate, and soon they are no longer Gypsies. The ones that remain are the descendants of generation after generation that chose again and again not to integrate. See also the Irish Travellers, an ethnically unrelated group with a similar culture.
Jews only got full citizenship rights in many European countries after the Enlightenment and in many ways their assimilation was absolutely a success, despite an enduring legacy of anti-Semitism (which was shown e.g. by the Dreyfus affair in France, not merely in places with a lengthy history of social authoritarianism and anti-Enlightenment values such as pre-1945 Germany). This, if anything, is proof that successful social integration can in fact be achieved in Europe - that "ethnic character" is not fixed in stone and can shift in response to incentives, at least over multi-generational timescales.
The path from Jewish emancipation in law to Jewish integration in practice was slowed and stymied by antisemitism at every turn, to greater and lesser degrees in different countries. It is hard to believe that Jews were ever regarded as true equals, broadly, in a country which willingly handed over so many to the Nazis. And of course in Spain, Jews were not full citizens and the practice of Judaism was simply forbidden entirely until 1978.
No. The revocation of that law from the Reconquista didn't change anything immediately. Jewish residents, some of whom were the descendents of those who had been there since Roman and even Phoenecian times, were not recognized as full citizens in modern Spain until 1978.
the people who “handed over so many to the nazis” - what makes you think they wouldn’t or didn’t gladly hand over non-jews if the regime demanded it?
your point about judaism being forbidden in spain until 1978 is shocking, thank you for that.
I would strongly recommend the following essay, which I read in an ethics class and found extremely powerful. The essay argues that humans can relatively easily be persuaded or intimidated into helping murder other humans, as long as they are introduced to it in the “correct” way. So we should understand what that way is and be vigilant against it.
Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust
John P Sabini, Maury Silver
Survivors, victims, and perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, 329-358, 1980
It may interest you that private confession of Islam was legal under Franco, but public practice of Islam, or the building of mosques, was banned in Spain until 1989. All of this goes back to the Reconquista and the Inquisition in the late 1400s, when Muslims and Jews were forced to convert, synagogues and mosques were repurposed as churches (and not coincidentally, ham became the national dish). Franco's version of fascism was merely a continuation of that.
That being said, you can't practice Christianity or Judaism openly in Saudi Arabia to this day. Looking at it from Mecca, the point of origin of the Caliphates, to their furthest extent into Europe in Spain (or the Balkans) you can still see the traces of extremist religious bans existing on both sides. Jews tend to get caught in the middle and slaughtered at each turn, as they need to seek accommodations with whichever larger religion is in power in order to survive, and then are seen as enemies by the other one.
All this is written on the streets and buildings of Granada, Spain, where ancient Jewish stars adorn old buildings where there are no Jews, where the oldest church was once a mosque, and the Alhambra, symbol of the Caliphate and its civilization, is the largest tourist attraction in Europe... where the markets sell everything Arabic yet the day to day interaction of Muslims and Christians is fraught, each understanding very well their own history in the place. And where it is very, very strange to be one of the only Jews... with both Christians and Muslims hating you and claiming to protect you.
> what makes you think they wouldn’t or didn’t gladly hand over non-jews if the regime demanded it?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Would someone need to exclusively repress Jews for that repression to meaningfully affect Jews' economic and human rights trajectory?
the parent implies: difference in status of jews -> repression of jews
My point is that the status difference is not required for a regime to repress some group. It might make it easier, but not required.
>Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust
That sounds as a very weak perspective to start with. That is, what if "they" are not "innocent"? There is definitely a standard out there that will allow to judge us as guilty of some heretic behavior, whoever we are.
Surely it would not be very wise to judge a book by its title, though.
indeed, would love your thoughts on the essay itself - iirc the title refers to a situation where a Nazi camp guard writes in their diary of a “special action” (which refers to the burning alive of prisoners) followed by a description of the soup that was served that day - the title seems appropriate to that situation at least. tbh its been a long time since I read it, so I may have got some minor details wrong. and I agree with your point about defining the victims as “guilty” might be part of the process. But the point of the essay seemed to be that almost no-one was making a considered moral judgement that what they were doing was correct, they were doing what they were told and had essentially “outsourced” their moral responsibility to the regime.
>One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
I will speak from the perspective of one who emigrated to the US.
Every new group is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" may find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.
Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.
In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth? Why hasn't this happened to the Somalians mentioned elsewhere? The Muslims of Dearborn?
Or look at Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>. Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain. But the outcomes are completely different.
I will ask you the same question you posed. Are these differences in outcome the groups' fault? Or the host society's fault?
The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build human capital. By contrast, the same state has not only failed to do so for the Black community, but its agents have engaged in extrajudicial killings of the community's members with impunity since they lost their legal "protection" as someone else's private property.
Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].
Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
> Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.
And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.
It's most significant, though, that you even say "Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds". No one says "French from Algerian muslim backgrounds". A French person with an Algerian background can only be a descendant of one of the million or so ethnic French who colonized Algeria, and is in no case a Muslim. The UK is far ahead of the continent in terms of integration, and the US is light years ahead of that.
I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that mainstream Islam, since then 1970s, has morphed into something closer to extreme ultraorthodox Judaism or an extreme branch of Christianity. And this is certainly an obstacle to integration. But it is not irreversible, and I think in particular rejection by a foreign host culture serves to reinforce that extremism. North Korean defectors have a lot of trouble assimilating in South Korea, despite speaking the same language. Their hard drives are formatted differently, their software is different. The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated. This means teaching individualism and the importance of education and self sufficiency rather than doling out welfare subsistence, but it also means the mainstream culture must actively try to embrace the individuals who wish to become part of mainstream society. Europe fails in both.
W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.
>The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated.
Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?
If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.
I like this coding analogy. Would they willingly accept 20 million people with bizarre and incompatible software? Yes but barely because it's in the same language? China has even less desire for the NK regime to fall, as the formatting and language would disrupt the balance in Manchuria.
But I'm not talking about what they want (whatever South Korea says they want about reunification). I mean what preparations are they making for absorbing that mass of people in the event that it happens... in particular, turning them from a faceless mass into prosperous and contributing individual members of a modern westernized society. South Korea has put a lot of study into that question, as did West Germany. So why can't France? They did control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries, after all. What's the difference between the potential collapse of Algeria and the collapse of NK, or at least what is the plan for it?
No one wanted civil wars in Syria and Libya that would send millions of refugees to Europe, but there has been no systematic approach to integrating them and, let's say, updating their software. The prevailing view seems to be that this is temporary rather than just a fraction of what is to come. Anyone looking at the demographics can see that if Europe fails to inculcate its Enlightenment values into its immigrant population within a generation, those values will cease to exist. So I mean what is the real plan?
I am not sure if this argument holds for France and its Muslim citizens. Historically, France didn't "control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries."
They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."
So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.
Maybe I exaggerated. But France controlled essentially all of Muslim west Africa at one point or another, and France's former colonies are the overwhelming source of their immigrant population. Outside of Quebec, the Francophone world is largely Muslim and African. For that reason, the analogy should hold: The people flooding into France were former subjects and partial citizens. South Korea views all Koreans from the North as citizens and has a plan for their integration, just like Israel views all Jews from Ethiopia or Morrocco or France as citizens; and has plans to absorb them. What is France's plan?
Are we really grouping all black people in one group here? The only thing that matters is income in the US. A poor white and a poor black have a lot in common, and the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth. It’s that simple. That being said, generational wealth among the black population has been building all this time. There are black communities today that have very high income levels and rates of homeownership.
>> the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth
Yes. And even after the institutionalized racism was banned in various forms, the social system of racism continues to this day in the form of lower wages for the same jobs, less chance of hiring or buying a home with the same qualifications.
What I am saying is that this is the indigenous European attitude toward migrants, and it is creating generations of ghettoized people who no longer believe they can integrate, just as generations of Black people in America gave up on integration, seeing that they were still kept out on a daily basis even after having achieved legal equality.
> I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.
I my country Jews lived for 800 years until they left without saying Godbye in 1940s. But we have never held them hostage - they were free to move to Ottoman Empire or North Africa if that suited them better. Or behind Pale of Settlement.
Living in ghettoes, sitting shiva for members of community that married non-Jews or assimiliated, being under influence of fanatical rabbis didn't help with integration.
'Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states...'
In the UK we have large numbers of both Pakistani and Indian immigrants. One group has integrated mostly successfully in all walks of life and the other one has not.
Hard to argue that this has not been a consequence of choice although plenty of experts, who have never lived with 100 miles of these communities, tell us otherwise.
The Pakistani (most Pahari/Mirpuri) community was segregated in de facto ghettos and were brought to work unskilled manual labor jobs in a couple industrial estates in the 50s-70s.
When the UK began deindustrializing, they were extremely hard hit because the factories shut down.
Poverty and Northern England racism (BNP was normalized and doing hate crimes well into the early 2000s, schools were shite with grammar schools closing, etc) kept Mirpuris stuck in the ghetto.
And trust me - a Brown guy - when I say that tbe UK is miles more racist and passive aggressive to Desis compared to the US or Canada.
Why integrate in a country that keeps being passive aggressive and using your community as a scapegoat.
This is why my parents moved to North America instead of Europe in the 1990s - heck my dad had an offer to work for ARM plc in Cambridge back then around the initial IPO.
None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany.
I'll get amazing schacenfreude when Labour finishes signing the FTA with India in a couple months and Rolls Royce and Dyson begin slowly moving operations.
None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany...
The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent, that he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling of racism is quite remarkable given he subsequently was unable to demonstrate a talent for anything.
> The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent
And the US had an African American President yet police brutality incidents still occur.
And that Prime Minister has anyhow left the UK and returned to California (a couple blocks from the Santa Monica Pier). Some GSB alums are setting up a VC Fund for that PM post-Downing Street as we speak.
Hell, his business career only started AFTER he immigrated to the US and then returned to the UK to work at TCM.
> he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling
P
Money is the ultimate equalizer in a country as status obsessed as the UK.
Sunak attended an independent school which his parents were able to afford being specialists.
Grammar Schools were shut down in the 80s-90s and comprehensives continue to underperform independent schools in placing students in Russell Group programs.
If you're parents were working class, you statistically will remain working class.
Intergenerational Social Mobility remains lows in the UK [0][1][2][3], and add to that economic depression in the North+Midlands and the very real othering that happens in the UK and that has caused the Mirpuri community to remain economically deprived.
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In the US I never get asked where I'm from, or told that "my English is excellent", or after a couple pints with coworkers get told "you're one of the good ones". Yet I've faced this kinda BS ALL THE TIME whenever I'm in the UK for work. It's worse on the mainland.
Fundamentally, in the US I am not treated as a token nor do I face microagressions. In the UK or Mainland Europe I have to deal with both.
> You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society. One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
Which Jews? Ultraorthodox don't integrate very well in Israel, for instance.
The tendency of a subsection of orthodox Jews from one area of Eastern Europe to self-ghettoize is something of a red herring. In Western Europe, Jews were never truly integrated unless they converted. And even those who converted and their mixed race children were ultimately slaughtered for their ethnic background, giving lie to the notion that even a WWI veteran ex-Jew could become German.
The Haredi (ultraorthodox) movement itself is a reaction to urban Jews who wished to assimilate when such a thing became conceivable in the 19th C. And this is a ghetto mentality. In American terms, your question would be equivalent to "which Black people?" Implying that people who claim and cling to ghetto culture have a hard time integrating. But that 1. dismisses the role that ghettoization had on creating a subculture in the first place, and then 2. pretends the subculture itself is the reason for failure to integrate, i.e. that it's the cause rather than the effect, and 3. serves to allow and excuse and justify the mainstream of society projecting their negative perceptions of that subculture onto individual members of the same ethnic group who would like to integrate without completely renouncing their unique heritage. And in the Jewish case, even complete renunciation wasn't enough, so perhaps the ghetto culture had a point.
> I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group.
I've lived besides Gypsy communities, and had during school Gypsy friends. Some were in the top of the class, and many were not. The big predictor for integration was not ethnicity but culture.
Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population. How would you integrate a culture that explicitly rejects integration without changing the culture itself?
> Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population.
Can we be more specific please?
I live in an European country and have not observed what you're describing here.
There are individuals and groups that have tendencies like you describe, but the generalization doesn't hold in my eyes.
I've had refugees in my family, inner circle, at workplaces and so on. The most general observation I can make is that people who tend to flee or migrate from authoritarian, politically oppressive places tend to be very appreciative of social democratic systems.
Specifically I meant some groups of Gypsies from Eastern Europe, where I've seen this behavior. Most immigrants don't fall in this pattern though, like you describe.
In Europe we have inmmigrants from all over the world, but consistently there's an area in a continent that shows up in crime stats way more than others. Can you explain that? Is that we are all xenophobic or racists or can we admit that there's a cultural component into it, because similar migrants within the same continent but different culture do actually do ok?
Other times may have different outcomes because countries and cultures change. Spain for example is a completely different country from what it was in the 80s, economically and culturally.
When you live in a place, and you see the same people showing up in stats, and people see the same behavior over and over and over and over, it's about time to quit calling people things and admit that something is going on and we should do things differently.
And if you don't then someone will show up promising to deal with it.
Personally I think it's less about accepting others, and more about the fact European economy sucks, has rigid job markets, and lacks entrepreneurial spirit. Historically people left Europe to the US, because that's where you could improve your life through hard work. Those Chinese-Americans improved their life by founding successful businesses, which doesn't seem to happen so much over here.
Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.
The economy sucks for everyone, not only a subset of poor migrants. A subset of african migrants show up in crime stats way more than plenty of other poor migrants coming from pretty much everywhere, be it asia, africa or latam.
Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.
>I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.
Strongly agreed on most of these points.
The U.S. on the one hand, for all the accusations of racism leveled against it (sometimes rightly) is generally very accepting towards immigrants and integrates them with surprisingly little xenophobia after a while. The U.S. has been doing this for many generations across many different ethnic groups and almost universally, after a couple or more generations, they identify more as americans than as members of their culture of origin, by far. Historically there has been tension and racism throughout this process but it tends to fade and millions of people of many ethnicities join the American mainstream remarkably well.
Also, it helps that American society and culture are extremely charismatic in the eyes of much of the world in a way that powerfully encourages the desire to integrate among immigrants, and especially their kids.
Most European societies don't have either of the above traits nearly as much as the U.S.
No matter how many decades one lives in the Netherlands, one would never be seen as "Dutch". Whereas a Mexican living for 10 years in the USA and throwing BBQs in his backyard would be seen as 100% American.
That’s only part of the problem. The other part is the incompatible religious values of the immigrants. Not all of course. But at least enough to cause conflict with western liberal values.
I think there’s a term confusion here, jews generally integrated well wherever they went but what they didn’t do was assimilate in the larger population. They kept their own traditions over the ones in the countries they migrated to and continued to keep tightly knited communities, to the envy or suspiciton of the host countries.
> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
Or even ask, how much should they integrate? I'm in the UK. Jewish communities seem to have held on to a certain cohesion, and kept their traditions alive well past when the natives gave up on their own traditions and communities
This post is incorrect in quite a few parts. Being a visitor, albeit even longer term, doesn't make you an automatic expert nor give you that much understanding, this thing isn't a linear function of time spent. Even being married or integrating hard doesn't automatically cover deeper topics.
Not going to write novel about this complex topic but in US, if you fail career/financially wise, society lets you easily die homeless on streets, nobody really bats an eye and everybody is focused on 'american dream', chasing money and career. Not so much in Europe. This stressor for newcomers aligns people towards direction that is actually beneficial to native society, unless they fail and turn to highly punished crime. Here in Europe we are often benevolent with social help (sometimes too much I'd say), and abuse is not uncommon, especially with migrants since systems were often not designed with this in mind. Most people perform very differently if they have firm pressure on them from many/all directions vs not so much.
Also, absolutely nothing you write is relevant about ie Switzerland, which works a bit more like US in terms of those pressures and it shows on the ground.
The issue is easily 10 levels deeper and wider, no point drilling into all of that. But please refrain from reductionism and clearly very US-centric and confident view and judging of society you clearly don't understand that much.
I strongly recommend modiano's occupation Trilogy on this general subject (jews in europe) 2012 Nobel prize winner (year from memory but modiano (french) def got a Nobel in literature)
You may not know this, but the word Gypsy is considered an insult by the people you reference to. It's like the N-word for black people. The preferred name is Romani.
We Europeans love to look down upon America when it comes to stuff like functional government, bicycle paths and public services, but wrt immigration we’re so far behind the US, it’s not even funny.
> a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French")
We really need to copy this vibe wholesale from the US (and Canada). That people can move here but even their grandchildren won’t feel that they’re properly French (or in my case, Dutch) is obscene.
I like your observation that the root cause is the ethnic character of our states but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a note or two out of the American playbook. Truth is we’re not even trying.
Instead we’re hopelessly split between the left who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there’s a problem (and calls you a racist when you try), and the right who want to hold onto some ethnic nation state pipedream that we never were and never will be.
One thing nearly every American agrees on is if you’re a citizen, you’re American. It’s actually an extremely welcoming and beautiful thing about this country.
The only reason you're thinking this way it's because you're thinking about problematic migrants, but there are many others you don't see. They don't need to become French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. They're perfectly fine feeling from $country in $eurocountry, going on with their lifes.
Europe is not the US, it can't be, and that doesn't mean we're at fault of everything. Many poor migrants come and do ok and have the same opportunities and challenges that others who fail.
But somehow is always the same subset we think about.
I attack the idea that someone born and raised in, say, NL whose grandparents moved in from, say, Turkey, is considered a Turk, often both by themselves and other people. In my opinion, if someone is born and raised here, they’re Dutch, or something like “Turkish-Dutch” maybe, but instead everybody talks about them like they are an immigrant.
To lock people inside their little immigrant identity groups, even when done out of some loving inclusive anti-racism vibe, has the adverse effect of what’s intended. It’s totally possible to be Dutch and Turkish and we should celebrate that, not fight it.
Noduerne, may I ask a question? I hope I do not offend you.
I know that million of white men died fighting against the Germans in WW2.
Why is it that 95% of what I hear from Jews is condemnation if white men for being NAZIs, when the majority of white men and the winning side fought against the Germans?
It seems like there should be a 60% gratitude to 40% condemnation split.
European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations
You as an American can move to France, and you'll never be considered French. Doesn't matter if you speak french every day for the rest of your life with the most perfect French accent the world has ever heard. And if you and your American wife have kids in France after living in France for 20 years, your kid isn't French either.. even if he lives there for another 80 years. Better hope your kid finds a french wife, or his kids won't be french either.
The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.
That is just not true. My grand parents migrated from Spain to France and my family perfectly assimilated. I never once in my life felt like anyone of us was not accepted as French.
Now I decided to myself live in Japan and I hear the very same speech as yours again and again about my host country. Yet my experience is very positive, I have integrated well and made my life here, and I never felt like I wasn't accepted.
But of course it took a lot of work to get there. Learning a new language, getting familiar with the local culture and embracing it is far from easy. The problem I see with some foreigners here is that they simply don't do this work and keep living in their own (often unhappy) bubble. Or even refuse to embrace some local customs because they are convinced that their own culture's way of doing things is superior to that.
I don't know why you think this: the French are explicit (and proud) of both their cultural chauvinism and their willingness to integrate those who fully assimilate into it. Assimilation is required, but it's also sufficient (in contrast with the US, where it's neither required nor sufficient).
> The idea that you move to a country and you're one of them is an American concept.
> You as an American can move to France, and you'll never be considered French. Doesn't matter if you speak french every day for the rest of your life
I wonder why you would think that. France is one of the few countries were it does work like this.
Unlike the US, in France it's not common to even ask where someone "comes from" if they speak French, most people will just assume you're French. After all, one of the current candidate Prime Ministers is half Vietnamese, and a former Prime Minister (somewhat candidate today as well I guess) was Spanish. But they are both as French as anyone else without question, because being French is not an exclusive identity (traditionally at least, but the rise of the extreme right these days is trying to change that).
it would be polite to act magnanimously in stating that America is not the only country with this behaviour, really I'm glad to see that the American god complex affects those across all walks of life
Of course you will have the French nationality, and of course we’ll consider you French! Don’t even need a French wife - I have many friends like this.
I might not consider you French if you scream “I hate France, vive l’Algérie” everyday, but a LOT of people will consider you French and, quote, “More French than the right-wing extremists”. Oh, the irony. You can say you hate France and all of the people in the center of Paris and Lyon will consider you are a good French.
> You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are.
So, if we're concerned about crime, let's create a set of laws where we can A) get the immigrants we need for demographic and workforce reasons, but B) where we can actually screen and be selective.
Plugging our ears and relying upon illegal migrants isn't going to result in good outcomes.
> It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
The desirable place is somewhere in the middle. We benefit from distinct identities and varied culture, but we also need to reach enough of a common ground to pull as one nation and for two random people to be able to get along meaningfully.
A whole lot of joys that I experience in life come from the ways we're varied, but breaking into enclaves would prevent those joys and weaken us.
We tend to reach various kinds of overreactions. Respect for diversity is great, but not to the point to completely reject integration. The avoidance of appropriation-- avoiding adopting traditions of another culture without attribution or respect-- is important, but not to the extent that it prevents mixing or getting along.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher, for certain categories of crime).
I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the United States, it took numerous generations of German-Americans to fully integrate into society, with towns in Wisconsin speaking a dialect of German well into the 1940s. Despite this lack of cultural integration, these cities experienced very little crime.
Different immigrant groups have better or worse outcomes, hence my saying "some immigrant groups". The cultural distance between the English progenitors of the US to the large wave of German immigrants in the 1800s is not as great as, say, that of Turkish immigrants to Germany post-WW2, or Syrian immigrants to contemporary Denmark.
Another way to look at it is that immigrant groups bring parts of their old world with them; German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture and established it in their new country.
You can see this with Italian immigrants to America. I’m in New Jersey right now, and recently was in Wyoming. These are obviously not the same people despite being “white.” They’re more different than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and we fought a war to be separate from each other.
> German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture
Did they? I can't speak to the crime rate of the German empire, but a very common reason to immigrate, in addition to availability of farm land, was to avoid the draft (low social trust). The slow rate of assimilation is also a signal that these were not people coming from a "high-social-trust" background.
WWI also forced the issue in a way that hasn't quite applied to other "ethnic" folks in the US. German immigrants, by and large, have been pushed towards forgetting their national culture altogether and assimilating into a newly-manufactured (by early 20th-century Progressives, no less), unified "White" identity.
There was as much (more, even) pressure on the Italians and Irish to do the same.
But, to add to and enforce OP's point, their cultures were a larger schism away and they instead held on and entrenched their identities (to their objective detriment, no matter your moral stance). Meanwhile, Anglo, Franco, German, Dutch, etc cultures all kind of melded into the early "White American" identity; due to the general ease of assimilation.
How much difference is there, really, between various European nationalities? They are all white and Christian, using similar language and script, mostly the difference is in the Christian denomination.
Similar language is a stretch. Sure, European languages have similar roots, if you go enough far back. But the ability to speak your native language with a fellow European of another nationality, and have a fluent conversation, is quite limited.
>History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
Twice as many Britons joined ISIS as served in the British military. <https://www.newsweek.com/twice-many-british-muslims-fighting...> The new ISIS members are not first-generation recent arrivals; they are the children and grandchildren of those who arrived decades ago.
Australia has a large number of ethnic groups, media and the far right claims similar issues.
Using statistics on the background of prisoners, in Australia, most non-white ethnic groups have lower representation in prison compared to their percentage of the population when compared to white Australians.
I wanted to verify the claim from your post/wikipedia link, as I don't believe it's true, but it's kind of a shame that wikipedia accepts a link to a 238 page report as the citation for a claim. It should at least refer to a specific page or section in the report. I don't want to hunt through hundreds of pages of this report to verify the claim. The report also doesn't have any sort of "conclusions" section so there's no quick way to even verify that the report is saying what they claim it's saying, let alone find the data behind the claim.
However, I did a quick search for every sentence containing the word Australia, and found nothing that seemed to back up the claim.
According to this statistic https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411761/australia-share-... Indigenous Australians are significantly overrepresented in the prison population. As of 2022, Indigenous Australians made up 31.8% of the prison population, despite constituting only about 3.3% of the total population. Because of this massive overrepresentation, it might well be that other non-white ethnic groups are underrepresented. It's statistic and doesn't tell why one minority ends up in jail so often.
This definitely wasn't true when I was researching during university (~2005). That was obviously a long time ago, so it's very plausible that things have changed. However, I'd want to see some very well-vetted data to believe it.
"African (predominantly South Sudanese) youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria's youth population."
I support immigration. I know a ton of university educated parents who either came here so or paid msrp price at American universities to get their education. And their kids all went to American universities. Through undergrad they got no free rides or scholarships either. They're smart and went to places like Emory or CMU.
But why is so damn hard to also solidly insist on an orderly border? The US is a proper country with borders. It cannot be if you shoot or sneak in you're served like the wilds of old western bar frontier living. That's not operationally effective.
I want both.
It's congress far, far, far more than any president that is responsible for taking a 0 on all this.
You have a wonderful skill at keeping the temperature down on hot issues. I know a simple upvote would suffice but I wanted to drop a compliment here regarding this talent of yours.
Interestingly various European nations turn out to be a poor comparison group for the United States. No one has conclusively determined why yet, but we know there's a strong correlation between a country having English as the primary language and immigrants integrating well.
This is especially true for second-generation immigrants. First generation immigrants are general less likely to commit crimes, but in countries like Germany and France the rate rises significantly with the second generation. That doesn't happen in the US or Canada, for example.
The children of immigrants in English speaking countries tend to do better financially than their parents whereas in many non-english speaking European countries the children of immigrants slide into poverty.
The UK has significantly better integration than the continent in line with the other Anglosphere countries.
I agree it's not enough evidence for anything conclusive. But I think it's enough evidence to say arguing about what will happen to the US based only on Sweden data is unsound.
> No one has conclusively determined why yet, but we know there's a strong correlation between a country having English as the primary language and immigrants integrating well.
To me this has a simple answer: (Western) countries with English as the primary language are all New World countries, with the obvious exception of the British Isles nations.
Ask immigrants or the children of immigrants (like me).
Western Europe are just extremely insular and passive aggressive and will gladly bury their head in the sand regarding their own racism.
Anglo countries at least tried to tackle racism by introducing education about racism (eg. Civil Rights Movement in US, Aboriginal Rights Movement in Australia, First Nation's Movement and racial quotas in Canada, the anti-Skinhead movement and the trade union lead anti-racism movement in the UK) and trying to build an identity that trascends race or ethnicity.
Similar movements happened in mainland Europe as well, but aren't taught about, so mainland Europeans remain insular in their mindset.
Ukrainians integrating into Polish culture is similar to the East and West German unification post wall, only more complicated by a few extra generations...
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
Does it suggest that, though? It suggests that, in the specific conditions that were presented to those groups, they turned to crime. However, we can't pretend that the previous generations of immigrants had exclusively good experiences and quality of life, even in Europe. Obviously, some countries tried their best but in the past decades we had far less experience on proper integration (we as in the collective we, no country has worked out some perfect plan on it).
In fact, certain countries specifically created neighbourhoods (ghettos) for immigrant populations, all with positive intentions. Can't really blame the migrants for then becoming "ghettoized" in such a scenario. Granted, I know of other countries that specifically did not do that and still had struggles, which just goes to show how the whole thing is a minefield, where good intentions can clash with harsh reality.
Yeah, but it seems like some nations are only willing to invest a low amount of effort in it working out. I.e. if you're highly educated skilled worker who will integrate on their own, great. If you're a manual laborer who will do the work no one wants, for less money, pay tax and integrate their kids, great. But if the host society needs to invest in their education, social programs and integration, then screw it, let them ghettoise and hope the resulting jump in nationalism and animosity towards them will balance things out.
> It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.
Why not? Mainstreams are temporary. The Romans shifted from pagans to christians in just a decade (officially speaking). The German speaking region of Belgium was annexed in the 1900s (now the country has 3 different official languages). The whole latin america started speaking Spanish long before they became actual countries. Spain was mostly muslim for over 700 years.
There’s no mainstream. We are always changing and the mix is always better.
Not every culture can integrate, not every culture is a step "forward". Also, your examples are quite weak
1. Paganism was not doing too well by the time Christianity became official.
2. Belgium is a joke country (sorry!) that still has a divided population based on the language they speak. Hardly a success case.
3. Americans speaking Spanish also resulted in losing native languages and cultures. It might be okay to accept it, but the implications in your case are obvious, and it definitely would deserve a fair bit of debate whether we're okay with that.
4. Right, because the Reconquista was famously a period of peace and prosperity...
If these are the arguments FOR massive immigration then don't be surprised the vast majority of the public is against it.
I don’t know man. This idea of certain cultures being so distant that they cannot be integrated with others sounds a bit alien to me. If anything, we (all the different cultures in this planet) are the result of a vast amount of mixing over the centuries. We probably don’t notice it anymore (proof that the mix has worked wonders) and we think we all are so good because “our” culture, “our” values. I mean, if something so profound such as religion was literally imported to America, anything is possible. Sometimes I wish we were invaded by aliens 100% different from us in every aspect, so that we realised once and for all that we all humans just are and feel the same.
Even relatively harmless things like haram vs non-haram meats can cause a huge struggle, yet alone other more nuanced, complex cultural issues.
Also should we really be accepting of cultures that openly and unashamedly want to harm marginalized groups such as anyone who identifies as LGBT? Getting some new recipes or whatever (as it appears that's the direction you're thinking of) is one thing, having people decapitating school teachers [1] because of a drawing (which itself was based on a lie) is a whole different thing which nobody sane should be in support of in literally any context, ever.
this is the most holier-than-thou (literally and figuratively) broad strokes opinion phrased as if it's a nuanced opinion about cultures.
i think it's self-evident from history and society that "importing" "barbarism" into "society"* is how we even started doing things like not unashamedly harming marginalized groups in the West. if i'm not mistaken most christian sects, whether in europe or america have had various levels of being okay with ostracizing and harming queer and trans people until very recent times. your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time, especially using the common scapegoat of other cultures taking longer to catch up on LGBT rights.
fascinating that other people's systems of being is "barbarism" and yours is "society". and thus, it's reasonable that most of the world thinks american society was barbaric with their deep rooted slavery and racism, and european society barbaric with their violent colonial extractionism defining much of their past and present.
> your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time...
I'm neither a Westerner, nor am I (entirely) White (1/2 Serbian, if you count it as white (you'd be surprised), 1/2 Indonesian). I also grew up in and lived in Indonesia the majority of my life. Nowhere did I state that only Western societies are the good ones, either, I tend to believe that Taoist and Buddhist countries have a better track record both in the modern day and in the past for the most part.
I'd appreciate if you didn't build a strawman of me, because I'm probably not the person you're imagining in your head. It's shocking, but people outside the west can also believe the west is doing things right and would like them to continue doing so, often because of the cultures they've observed back home.
No, what I consider barbarism is a system of being in which it's okay to commit a brutal beheading because the victim dared to show some drawings of a guy you call a Prophet. Or the one that throws people they don't like off of buildings. Or the one that buries people in the ground and chucks rocks at their heads until they die. Or preventing little girls from attending primary and high schools.
How many beheadings of innocent people exercising their freedoms provided by the nation they were born in are we okay with until we finally admit, maybe we shouldn't be letting them play in our nice garden if they're just going to kick the flowers and rip out the roots?
I grew up in Indonesia, and the entire reason I'm in the West is because of these types of people who'd do such heinous things. And guess what? The Europeans welcomed me with wide open arms, whereas many of my own countrymen would have me grievously harmed due to not being a follower of their hideous beliefs.
it was evident to me from your other comments that you yourself are an immigrant to the west, but it was also evident that you believed the west is in a better place because "it is doing things right", and therefore other places (including where you came from) are doing things wrong. my comment was less about who you are (ethnically, passport-wise, etc), but about the cultural superiority you ascribe to the west with your comment (which many non-white non-westerners do). i myself am an american citizen by immigration, probably for similar reasons to yourself, after having lived approx half my life in 4 other countries, but i don't know how relevant that is either. that these countries have welcomed you and i with open arms doesn't reinforce your opinion that they won't harm someone who didn't follow their beliefs, it just so happens that we follow their beliefs and so we get along. in fact, your comment is literally arguing for not welcoming people who don't follow your beliefs (assuming they are of violent intent).
this discussion imo is far too complex for a HN comment thread, but your depiction of "barbarism" is deeply rooted in western narratives omitting details such as many people from those places also find those atrocities terrible, and they are perpetuated because of a few powerful bigoted people and lots of propaganda. when atrocities are justified with propaganda, i think it's crude to think the people or the societies are barbaric as much as the leaders (usu. religious ones) are. western societies moved past honor killings, feudalism, slavery, concentration camps and other barbaric practices not-so-long ago, and to a great extent because of the resources they extracted from other countries during that time afforded them to bandwidth to focus on equitable societies. following that, wanting to isolate people of those other societies from also becoming part of these more equitable societies by precluding them as barbaric and therefore shouldn't be allowed here, imo, is what is barbaric.
the contemporary west has also repeatedly shown itself capable of direct barbarism too, like brutally levelling a school of innocent children in Pakistan or drone-striking innocents as collateral damage with no restraint. or what, is unjustified murder & cruelty only barbaric when done on your own soil, and fair game done in someone else's country with citizen tax dollars?
also somewhat unrelated but yes, serbian is white insofar as they genetically present features mostly associated with western white society (light-colored eyes, hair color other than black, caucasian bone structure) so without considering family circumstances/political background, that's white, at least on observation. of course with your mixed heritage i understand this may not be true of you specifically.
Also, it wasn't solely the 6 teens, it was also their parents and their communities at large outraged about what the teacher did and wanting his head on a spike (show a drawing of Muhammad). Not to forget the spark of the outrage, the girl who was skipping class and lied about what the teacher did, which instigated it all.
There was also that small Charlie Hebdo thing, and the Quran burning in Sweden, and countless other similar events over the years in Europe alone.
I was born and grew up in Indonesia, and the crap that was happening in Aceh, one of the only islands in Indonesia that practices Sharia law whereas the rest of the country is more secular, churns the stomach. I have no problems with Islam for the most part, but proponents of Sharia law are truly sociopathic monsters that have no place in the 21st century.
Freedom of choice? You realize we're talking about a man who got beheaded because of showing drawings of Muhammad to his students, right? (Ignoring the fact that the instigator of the whole event lied about what he actually did)
Do I not have the freedom of choice of not wanting people who will murder over something like that in the same country as myself?
> Do you believe you are presenting an honest appraisal of both the upside risk and downside risk of immigration?
I never said I'm anti-immigration. I'm an immigrant mysely, soon to be a naturalized citizen of my host country after years of hard work at embracing its culture and traditions as much as I can.
I am, however, anti-immigration if the kind of people we're talking about are the types of people that go around beheading people, regardless of their reasoning.
I’m talking about immigration as a haystack, but you seem to think that we can know in advance who the needles are.
Are you under the impression that we can tell barbarians apart from other immigrants and that we still let them in the country?
It sounds like you are listening to propaganda media and have no idea what is actually happening with immigration dynamics right now.
The barbarians are all religious. The only way to reduce the chance of terrorism to near zero is to either stop all immigration or to stop immigration of religious people. We don’t, because this country was founded by religious zealots and because we value freedom.
I've seen this a bit throughout the discussion so let's make it explicit: how on earth would someone socialized in a world where women are second tier, murders in the name of protecting the family honor, sidelining official judiciary systems, putting religion over the state, rape, sexual assault and on an on integrate well with a country that has totally different values (i.e. is a child of enlightenment)? How does that work? We see again and again, that it does not work. We (=Germany) have plenty of statistics to offer. Why some countries (muslim countries btw) have a way higher part of that and others don't.
How is the culture of Talibans compatible with western morale? How? It's just not. We aren't all the same, that's just ignoring the truth of how the world works and is plenty naive. That doesn't mean that these people are lesser beings, but that the gap between "them" and "us" (which is a culture thing btw, not a gene thing) is bigger. And that also means that it's not equidistant throughout. We're not all socialized equally.
40% of suspects don't have a German passport while the base group is 15% relative to the whole country.
Opinons like yours prevent successful immigration discussions because you have the wrong foundation. That prevents us from having a) a proper integration discussion b) solving current issues and c) creating a working immigration system.
A monoculture is almost always worse. The mix is what has made--and often continues--to make countries stronger. We can disagree about the quantity or blends, yet it seems obvious to me from insular cultures that we have to have more than zero.
Sure. I don't think even the most rabid anti immigration advocate would hold the number at zero, but using the GP's logic ("the mix is always better") the Native Americans should be quite grateful they were culturally enriched by the incoming Europeans.
All mass influxes of immigrant communities will have some crime element initially due to poverty and discrimination.
This is normal and should be expected.
It’s a part of the integration process over initial generations.
For the US, you can trace the phenomena to the influx of Irish Catholics in the early 1800s and from there to…
Eastern European Jews, Italians, Armenians, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Indians, Puerto-Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, Nigerians, Somalians and other immigrant communities.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations
This might be true, but some European countries are notoriously hard to integrate. The situation could be vastly different in societies that aren’t monocultural, e.g. USA.
As far as I understand it, this study is of limited use in discussing today's illegal immigration wave because of two reasons: one, it does not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants; and two, it does not distinguish between the incentives driving immigrants before the establishment of the welfare state and those thereafter.
It stands to obvious reason that an invited houseguest is better-behaved than one that jumped the fence to be there, and doubly so if there is free cake being served. Any claims to the contrary need to examine the two groups separately.
Again, laying low is what illegal immigrants do. What “free cake” do illegal immigrants get? Shelter and food?
Just look at Georgia’s law a few years ago where they enforced strict paperwork with the threat of arresting the employer - probably the worst productive year for agriculture because they didn’t have cheap labor to rely on.
Enforce deportation to the greatest extent possible but be prepared to pay for it.
To my knowledge, there is no version of this claim that distinguishes between illegal and legal immigrants. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong.) In fact, it would be silly to claim that illegal immigrants as a group commit fewer crimes per capita than natives, since 100% of them have already violated laws by being on US soil to begin with.
Legal immigrants, on the other hand, are absolutely less likely to engage in criminal behavior than the general population, because they are both selected for positive traits as well as knowing that a criminal record will jeopardize their chances of citizenship.
Citations/sources conspicuously absent. If you go far back enough, just about the entire population of the US could be considered immigrants. Which wave of immigrants are you referring to? Are you including petty crimes in your claim or just the more serious ones?
If voters are concerned about crime, then the need to educated that immigrants, even illegal immigrants, have crime rates about the same as Americans at large.
Because legal immigrants are both pre-filtered and have something to lose, it’s more reasonable to take the approach that one crime is too many with immigration, rather than comparing with the crime rate of society at large.
This is a MAGA talking point so there are people who agree with your take. I think that is an unreasonable and ridiculous position given its impossibility. In light of how much the US benefits from immigration overall, it’s also shortsighted.
Zero immigrant crime is absolutely impossible, I agree, but targeting zero crime should be an immigration policy goal. Enshrining some moral obligation to help the rest of the world into law is wrong.
Again, you’re repeating MAGA talking points. Targeting zero crime is code for restricting legal immigration via Byzantine immigration requirements. Moreover, the goal has been largely achieved: immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than Americans [1], [2]. Your last sentence is nonsensical in the current context.
If we are applying that emotionally charged nonsense as a standard then why not apply the same standard to the victims of police murders and conclude that the police need deported? Or exilr all doctors given the number of molesters among them?
>> If we are applying that emotionally charged nonsense..
I don’t see how that is emotionally charged. The simple fact is Jocelyn Nungaray would likely be alive today if that person had been prevented from illegally crossing the border.
Your other argument is irrelevant to my point that if border laws were enforced the crime could not have occurred in the first place.
You cannot use Europe as an example, because, it might surprise you, but European cultures are vastly different from American culture. A lot of the marginalized groups in Europe, have no problem integrating in the US.
And to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous when you have all these far-right political parties openly showing their colours and saying matter of fact that they do not want any foreigners, including legal ones, including educated ones.
And finally, what's the link between integration and crime? I don't see the connection. If anything, the people who are least integrated are the ones who are the most law abiding. The lead a pious life according to their faith. They aren't the ones going around dealing drugs in night clubs. Those drug dealers are much more integrated in the host culture. After all drug consumption is very European.
> And finally, what's the link between integration and crime? I don't see the connection.
Here's some data from Denmark[0], for example, that breaks down various statistics for different immigrant groups in Denmark. I take it as axiomatic that immigrants from other Western countries are better integrated to Danish society than those from farther-away (culturally speaking) places[1]. You can see that as a group, immigrants from majority Muslim countries are very strongly overrepresented in violent crime.
> to put the blame of lack of integration purely on the immigrant group is very disingenuous
Modern immigration isn't slavery, where someone was forcibly brought to a new land against their will. Nobody has a right to be in any country they please, other than their home. So it follows that the onus is on immigrants to assimilate to the laws and cultures of the country they voluntarily chose to go to. Of course, it would be welcoming of the host country to facilitate that process, but I don't see that as being obligatory.
> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations...
I wish we as a society could focus on people, not ethnic groups.
Deport people who can't assimilate, keep those who can. Figure out more accurate ways to determine who is who then skin color (or even things like personal taste).
Some stereotypes are backed by statistics, but there's a reason why all stereotypes are bad.
> The study found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
Conservative voters also think crime in general is spiraling out of control, because a certain fan of fake tanning products keeps shouting it to them. It's not even remotely true. Both violent and property crime have plunged for decades and by and large is still falling: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024...
Hilariously, a significant uptick in homicides occurred during Fake Tanning Product's presidency, and it's dropped during Biden's:
> In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year.
Voters were also 'concerned' Democrats were running a pedo ring out of a pizza shop basement. That pizza shop does not even have a basement. By your logic, we should be hiring more FBI agents to inspect pizza shops looking for pedo rings because "voters are concerned" and writing legislation that requires pizza shop owners get CORI checks.
> History and data from various European nations
Why are you using historical data from another continent that is very different culturally, when there's data from the US Undocumented migrants and immigrants in the US commit half the crime US citizens do. Probably because they're here to work to do things like send money home, and so they're keeping their heads down (not to mention, busy working...)
I already provided a study, but here's more about the issue. The Brennan Center article includes links to numerous studies refuting your claims. The evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive: immigrants, documented or not, commit significantly fewer crimes per capita than US citizens.
Why stop at the country level? We could just as easily have ethnic and cultural homogeneity on a global level. We'd have much lower crime and higher employment if all culture world-wide were homogenous. No ghettoized countries and such. /s
Lesser? The US is the largest economy in the history of the world. And military. It is responsible for brokering and maintaining the freest, most prosperous time in history — the post WWII globalization.
Oh, here’s where I’ll be a little less, er, academic — as someone who lives in a city shaped by the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants - fuck out of here with “lesser”.
Does a big economy and military make a country great? America is in shambles in terms of order, governance, rule of law—the constitution has been shredded—and social trust, which is exactly what you would expect to be affected by social change from immigration.
I said “arguably lesser,” because people obviously have different utility functions. I would say an orderly and well governed society like Sweden or Germany is better than a chaotic and disorderly but somewhat richer society like the United States. Obviously people may differ on that. My point is that immigration changed the country fundamentally.
I agree with you. There was clearly a lot of well documented tension between different ethnic groups in the US, during the post Civil War Period up to the elections of FDR and Kennedy, even after, especially in eastern cities. People who dismiss this as just 'bigotry and ignorance' are giving a hand-wavy explanation. There were legitimately different views and interests and cultures between the groups. There still is. If a political divide is real and one side wins, it stands to reason that side made changes that favored their group. So clearly outcomes are different.
> America is in shambles in terms of order, governance, rule of law
Or we could try another perspective: America is, beyond peradventure, the most successful continent-wide, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society in the history of the world. Lots of problems, but we're working on them.
That is gerrymandered with qualifiers like some government RFP designed with a specific vendor in mind.
What most people want is an orderly, well-functioning society with a government that serves their needs. The United States is closer to a third world country on that front than Western European or Scandinavian countries. And it’s only going to get worse. The prosperity of California today, for example, is the result of inertia from the well-governed California of the 1960s-1980s. At the time, the foreign-born population had dropped below 5%. Now it’s over 15%.
> What most people want is an orderly, well-functioning society with a government that serves their needs.
Most people also want vigorous good health, satisfying work, plenty of income, and rewarding personal relationships. They'd also be glad to have well-adjusted children who are independent and self-motivated yet always listen to their parents' wise counsel. (And more than a few kids want a pony ....)
Sadly, life doesn't always work that way. It certainly doesn't do so reliably and scalably, or at least we haven't figured out how to make it so.
There's also the challenge of trying to achieve quasi-static local "maxima" (so-called) in an inescapably-turbulent world. It's not clear we've sufficiently explored the costs and burdens of such an effort.
> The United States is closer to a third world country on that front than Western European or Scandinavian countries.
Depends on what you're optimizing for. The international order supported by Pax Americana isn't perfect, but it beats anything the world has seen since Pax Britannia — and again, America and its allies are working on improving it.
> At the time, [California's] foreign-born population had dropped below 5%. Now it’s over 15%.
Oh, the irony of a scion of a successful immigrant family saying (in effect): OK, we got here and made good, so it's time to shut the gates ....
> Sadly, life doesn't always work that way. It certainly doesn't do so reliably and scalably, or at least we haven't figured out how to make it so.
I don't disagree that we're stuck with the cultural schisms we have, at least in the near term. But that doesn't mean we must continue to make things worse through mass immigration. We could do what we did in the 1920s, dramatically curtail immigration, and work on assimilating all the people we already have.
> Depends on what you're optimizing for. The international order supported by Pax Americana isn't perfect, but it beats anything the world has seen since Pax Britannia — and again, America and its allies are working on improving it.
Sure. But it seems self-evident that American policy should be optimizing for the well-being of Americans, not those of other people in other countries.
> Oh, the irony of a scion of a successful immigrant family saying (in effect): OK, we got here and made good, so it's time to shut the gates ....
It's not ironic--I also think the government should raise my taxes for the good of the rest of the country. I'm grateful to have been given the opportunity to grow up in Virginia in the 1990s. But I can also see that the place I grew up no longer exists because of the very immigration wave of which my family was a part.
Moreover, as a foreigner, I'm better positioned to understand how immigrants bring with them deep-seated cultural attitudes even when they assimilate at a superficial level.
Think I learned it from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court where it appears with some frequency:
But come—never mind about that; let’s—have you got such a thing as a map of that region about you? Now a good map—”
“Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers have brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil, and an onion and salt added thereto, doth—”
> Peradventure is a good word. Do you have to be a lawyer to know it?
Agreed that it's a good word. I'd never heard or seen it myself until I was a mid-level partner at my then-law firm, and our senior partner used the phrase "beyond peradventure."
Yeah, it's probably the worst comment I've ever seen Rayiner write. (This is the nicest way I can word this comment; it'd be impossible for me to say what I really feel about that insult to my heritage without breaking the site guidelines.)
Irish people such as my ancestors fought and died for America in WWII. They were among the finest patriots who served the country.
It was a demented comment. Like the parent commenter, I'm living in a city built in large part by Irish and Italian immigrants (as well as members of a couple of other ethnic groups which people are happy to mock, if they're the kind of people who mock ethnic groups) well before FDR was elected (WTF?) and... I just don't know where to begin...
I'm loath to engage more with this weird anti-Irish prejudice, but I should point out that your blaming the Irish (and Italians apparently?) for FDR is ahistorical. FDR won 42 of 48 states and won the popular vote against Hoover by 17%, about 7 million votes. The total number of Irish immigrants who arrived in the US during that time was like 350k [1]. Needless to say, FDR was also not Catholic.
Crime among immigrants is largely correlated with unemployment rates. European countries with immigrant crime problems have high unemployment rates, the US does not.
This is not a good explanation without also looking at who is unemployed. In Sweden, the unemployment is low:ish but it is basically non-existent with the natives, but very high among immigrants. So it might be true that crime correlates with unemployment rates, but Sweden does not have a high unemployment.
Canada has a much higher middle Eastern population than Sweden. Canada does not have a middle Eastern crime problem nor a middle Eastern unemployment problem.
I imagine the biggest difference is that the core of this group has been in Canada for almost 50 years.
Those voters concerns aren't driven by the actuality of social issues with the integration of Somalis they are largely driven by racism and fantasy while on the overall actual crime continues to decline.
You may not be concerned about the crime, but many voters are. The author of the article you linked to also exhorts the Somali immigrant community to not engage in crime.
> because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency until the 2nd and 3rd generation is able to make it into established society.
History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher than the native population, for certain categories of crime).
It's clear that the national interest is in accepting skilled immigrants who migrate legally and are able to integrate fully into the host society, a la Teddy Roosevelt's dropping of the hyphen. It is not desirable to have separate ethnic groups who "share the same language, culture and faith" distinct from the mainstream.