Are current immigrants to the west going to assimilate the way the Irish and Italians did?
That’s the basic question at hand with the meaningful current policy choice.
The answer is no. The Irish and Italians assimilated because they are white. While they had differences with old stock whites, these are small compared to the differences between whites and non whites.
People trying to use the experience of white ethnic immigration pre 24 to justify current non-white immigration are simply incorrect.
I’ll write about this in a future post, but all evidence from intermarriage to language ability to political behavior shows that Hispanics, Asians, Arabs etc are assimilating way faster (and arguably “becoming white” faster) than Irish or Italians did.
Political behavior is certainly not converging. This isn’t the first rodeo where a Republican gets 4x% of the Hispanic vote. GWB did it. It will swing back just like it did with him and hover in the 2x-4x range.
For Trump to do it he had to move the party left on economics and the Dems had to go nutso on basically everything.
You might one day get convergence in the sense Charles Murray said. Where the gop becomes a Latin American style Conservative Party to appeal to the median Hispanic voter. But that’s not “assimilation”, that’s changing the culture.
Why I think you’ll find is that Hispanics are assimilating to the lower middle class norms of the areas they move to and Asians are assimilating the umc norms of the areas they move to. So for instance Hispanics start getting divorced more just like the native lower middle class.
Of course it’s a two way street to they both assimilate to and pull the local culture towards themselves. Asian immigration makes the umc much more credentialism focused and increases goodhearting substantially. Indian immigration ramps up nepotism, etc. but they do assimilate more baizou values over time.
The thing is none of that is good if you’re a middle class white conservative. They aren’t assimilating to your values. Irish and Italians moved out to the suburbs and became normal white middle class conservatives (because deep down that’s what they are). We aren’t seeing the same thing with non-whites, just a split into ghetto culture and SWPL norms.
The closest thing to assimilation is that of “white hispanics” in red states, but that’s taken a very strong conservative culture (whites voting 60-70% gop) and certain other factors, including the fact that in the lighter end of the scale Hispanics are mostly European genes.
We're what, 25 years into real Hispanic + Asian migration at scale? Irish, Italians, Jews took three generations to be more or less normal whites. At this point in the migration process they lived in slums, voted for ultra-corrupt machine politicians, were running organized crime syndicates, etc. We don't know how good we have it! Hispanics and Asians have assimilated into mainstream US culture much faster than Irish or Italians and we're still in the very early stages. As you say, there's some cultural change in the other direction too (more with Asians than Hispanics since Hispanic culture is really not that different from white ethnic LMC culture), but it was the same way with Irish and Italian migration as well, which actually did make the US a lower-trust country. There was much more cultural persistence of Irish/Italian dysfunction than we like to remember (e.g. "Southie" and the Mafia into the 1990s). Given all that, the track record for Hispanics and Asians is just much stronger.
And most of the Latin American-ization of American politics in the last 10 years is about decline in social trust among whites, Hispanics are like 10% of the electorate.
Tammany Hall got things done. If the price of building the Brooklyn Bridge was that some Irish politicians got a little skim, so be it. The Democratic Party today still has people getting rich off urban machine corruption today, but they can't build shit. The black and brown version of Tammany Hall sucks. Those white ethnics were a lot more competent and practical.
When you add up all non-whites its 30% of the electorate. Romney lost with 59% of the white vote because he lost non-whites (including immigrants) big time and there were a lot more of them then when the same kind of white vote would have given Reagan a landslide.
Moreover, Hispanic votes are concentrated in certain places. California whites voted 51% for Romney, but the state is the definition of a one party dem dictatorship because of Hispanics.
"The answer is no", without evidence. Meanwhile intermarriage in Canada is way, way, higher now than it was between 'whites' in the 19th century!
Young Blacks and Asians in Canada are just as likely to marry non-blacks/Asians as another black/Asian person! Furthermore,a full two third of third generation immigrants marry someone outside their ethnicity, a rate that has continued to increase over time.
In the greater Toronto area, "45 per cent of second-generation immigrants who are married or living common law are doing so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. By the third generation, it spikes to a stunning 68 per cent."
Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal demain very nice places to live and indeed the immigrants I know there have become extremely Canadian . This works much less well elsewhere (I currently live in London, UK, where it's a lot more ghettoised) but it's clearly possible in practice.
Canada has recently backtracked on its immigration policy, reducing targets and increasing requirements. Its leaders have admitted the mistake they made.
Your link says nothing about food theft by Indians (or anyone else), just that a bunch of food banks decided to restrict their service to citizens and permanent residents.
It is true that Canada recently cut back on immigration, although it still has (as it long had) one of the highest immigration rates in the world. A major motivation was housing prices.
I'm slightly confused what the point here is. Let's take your claim as is regarding stagnant GDP/capita, I think this is broadly correct in a USD basis. There has also, as you have pointed out, an enormous surge in relatively low skilled immigration.
There's a large non permanent resident underclass, doing many of the lowest paid jobs, and a stable GDP/capita, which implies that permanent residents have in fact seen a substantial boost to their earnings. Citizens are now doing the better, higher paid jobs, being served by minimum wage workers from India (who are themselves much better off than they would be in India!)
I'm struggling to see what exactly is disastrous here.
So here is what's interesting about this statement.
The criteria for immigration to Canada is exactly the same as the criteria for immigration under the American H1B system. The wage floor is the same. The slapping a green card to each degree is the same. Compared to average Canadians I imagine the economic stats aren't that bad.
All Canada did was 10x it. What did that accomplish? Well, you imported a lot of very mediocre white collar workers. Did importing a lot of mediocre white collar workers create Silicon Valley 2.0? No. Did it enrich Canada? No.
It turns out that the bottleneck to economic growth isn't mediocre white collar workers. Especially if they have hugely different cultures.
This is obviously predictable. There is an entire society full of mediocre white collar workers with a higher average IQ than the west. East Asia. Its economic productivity is 60% of ours (and I'm talking the democratic developed countries).
You actually need high trust and creativity to create economic growth.
Are current immigrants to the west going to assimilate the way the Irish and Italians did?
That’s the basic question at hand with the meaningful current policy choice.
The answer is no. The Irish and Italians assimilated because they are white. While they had differences with old stock whites, these are small compared to the differences between whites and non whites.
People trying to use the experience of white ethnic immigration pre 24 to justify current non-white immigration are simply incorrect.
I’ll write about this in a future post, but all evidence from intermarriage to language ability to political behavior shows that Hispanics, Asians, Arabs etc are assimilating way faster (and arguably “becoming white” faster) than Irish or Italians did.
Political behavior is certainly not converging. This isn’t the first rodeo where a Republican gets 4x% of the Hispanic vote. GWB did it. It will swing back just like it did with him and hover in the 2x-4x range.
For Trump to do it he had to move the party left on economics and the Dems had to go nutso on basically everything.
You might one day get convergence in the sense Charles Murray said. Where the gop becomes a Latin American style Conservative Party to appeal to the median Hispanic voter. But that’s not “assimilation”, that’s changing the culture.
Why I think you’ll find is that Hispanics are assimilating to the lower middle class norms of the areas they move to and Asians are assimilating the umc norms of the areas they move to. So for instance Hispanics start getting divorced more just like the native lower middle class.
Of course it’s a two way street to they both assimilate to and pull the local culture towards themselves. Asian immigration makes the umc much more credentialism focused and increases goodhearting substantially. Indian immigration ramps up nepotism, etc. but they do assimilate more baizou values over time.
The thing is none of that is good if you’re a middle class white conservative. They aren’t assimilating to your values. Irish and Italians moved out to the suburbs and became normal white middle class conservatives (because deep down that’s what they are). We aren’t seeing the same thing with non-whites, just a split into ghetto culture and SWPL norms.
The closest thing to assimilation is that of “white hispanics” in red states, but that’s taken a very strong conservative culture (whites voting 60-70% gop) and certain other factors, including the fact that in the lighter end of the scale Hispanics are mostly European genes.
We're what, 25 years into real Hispanic + Asian migration at scale? Irish, Italians, Jews took three generations to be more or less normal whites. At this point in the migration process they lived in slums, voted for ultra-corrupt machine politicians, were running organized crime syndicates, etc. We don't know how good we have it! Hispanics and Asians have assimilated into mainstream US culture much faster than Irish or Italians and we're still in the very early stages. As you say, there's some cultural change in the other direction too (more with Asians than Hispanics since Hispanic culture is really not that different from white ethnic LMC culture), but it was the same way with Irish and Italian migration as well, which actually did make the US a lower-trust country. There was much more cultural persistence of Irish/Italian dysfunction than we like to remember (e.g. "Southie" and the Mafia into the 1990s). Given all that, the track record for Hispanics and Asians is just much stronger.
And most of the Latin American-ization of American politics in the last 10 years is about decline in social trust among whites, Hispanics are like 10% of the electorate.
Tammany Hall got things done. If the price of building the Brooklyn Bridge was that some Irish politicians got a little skim, so be it. The Democratic Party today still has people getting rich off urban machine corruption today, but they can't build shit. The black and brown version of Tammany Hall sucks. Those white ethnics were a lot more competent and practical.
When you add up all non-whites its 30% of the electorate. Romney lost with 59% of the white vote because he lost non-whites (including immigrants) big time and there were a lot more of them then when the same kind of white vote would have given Reagan a landslide.
Moreover, Hispanic votes are concentrated in certain places. California whites voted 51% for Romney, but the state is the definition of a one party dem dictatorship because of Hispanics.
"The answer is no", without evidence. Meanwhile intermarriage in Canada is way, way, higher now than it was between 'whites' in the 19th century!
Young Blacks and Asians in Canada are just as likely to marry non-blacks/Asians as another black/Asian person! Furthermore,a full two third of third generation immigrants marry someone outside their ethnicity, a rate that has continued to increase over time.
In the greater Toronto area, "45 per cent of second-generation immigrants who are married or living common law are doing so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. By the third generation, it spikes to a stunning 68 per cent."
All Mixed Up: Toronto is the mixed-marriage capital of Canada - Toronto Life https://share.google/oMLDhm1TY9ud91EH4
Toronto, Ottawa, and Montréal demain very nice places to live and indeed the immigrants I know there have become extremely Canadian . This works much less well elsewhere (I currently live in London, UK, where it's a lot more ghettoised) but it's clearly possible in practice.
Canada has been a total failure. Its GDP per capita has been flat for over decade, right around when it started going maximum Indian immigration.
Its food banks had to shut down because Indians steal too much food.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/international-students-in-canada-left-struggling-after-food-banks-restrict-access/articleshow/121240524.cms
Canada has recently backtracked on its immigration policy, reducing targets and increasing requirements. Its leaders have admitted the mistake they made.
Huh?
Canada's GDP per capita (PPP) has increased every year since 2015 except for 2020 (Covid), which more than recovered by the following year:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=CA
Your link says nothing about food theft by Indians (or anyone else), just that a bunch of food banks decided to restrict their service to citizens and permanent residents.
It is true that Canada recently cut back on immigration, although it still has (as it long had) one of the highest immigration rates in the world. A major motivation was housing prices.
Canada’s gdp per capita was $52,xxx in 2011. It’s $54,xxx in 2024.
The us had the same gdp per capita in 2011. In 2024 it’s $86k.
There was a temporary boost during Covid when immigration crashed. But since immigration surged after Covid per capita gdp fell.
I don't know what to tell you. Follow my World Bank link above. Canadian GDP per capita (PPP) was $41,666 in 2011 and $65,463 in 2024.
I'm slightly confused what the point here is. Let's take your claim as is regarding stagnant GDP/capita, I think this is broadly correct in a USD basis. There has also, as you have pointed out, an enormous surge in relatively low skilled immigration.
There's a large non permanent resident underclass, doing many of the lowest paid jobs, and a stable GDP/capita, which implies that permanent residents have in fact seen a substantial boost to their earnings. Citizens are now doing the better, higher paid jobs, being served by minimum wage workers from India (who are themselves much better off than they would be in India!)
I'm struggling to see what exactly is disastrous here.
"relatively low skilled immigration"
So here is what's interesting about this statement.
The criteria for immigration to Canada is exactly the same as the criteria for immigration under the American H1B system. The wage floor is the same. The slapping a green card to each degree is the same. Compared to average Canadians I imagine the economic stats aren't that bad.
All Canada did was 10x it. What did that accomplish? Well, you imported a lot of very mediocre white collar workers. Did importing a lot of mediocre white collar workers create Silicon Valley 2.0? No. Did it enrich Canada? No.
It turns out that the bottleneck to economic growth isn't mediocre white collar workers. Especially if they have hugely different cultures.
This is obviously predictable. There is an entire society full of mediocre white collar workers with a higher average IQ than the west. East Asia. Its economic productivity is 60% of ours (and I'm talking the democratic developed countries).
You actually need high trust and creativity to create economic growth.