Look at it this way. Would you like it if, through “addition” and natural attrition, 20% of your company was ex-McKinsey folks? Countries are the same as companies. The way they are reflects the culture and values of the people. When a large fraction of your population becomes recent immigrants from the subcontinent, your country will become more like the subcontinent.
I’m part of the problem here. Half my family lives in Canada now. They’re super nice people and their food is a huge upgrade over the dreck Canadians were eating. But they’re Bangladeshi, not Canadian, in substance if not in legal technicalities. They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy.
> your country will become more like the subcontinent
You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves.
To be sure, immigrant enclaves such as the Haredim in NYC or the heavily-Muslim banlieues in France can do that. But it's generally on a very-local basis.
And on a national, long-term basis: Successive generations are born to immigrant families. They marry — often to spouses from other ancestral cultures — and have their own kids. Those kids are influenced in countless ways by their teachers; their friends and other peers; the media; and other facets of mainstream culture.
That's how assimilation happens: The host culture absorbs immigrants — and influences them — while borrowing from their cultures, adding new ingredients to the "alloy" (or amalgam? I'm avoiding the Melting Pot metaphor).
Or at least that's what happens when the host culture doesn't engage in knee-jerk exclusionary behavior out of pathological fear of The Other and an egotistical assumption that We Know Best About All Things For All Time.
(Source: As I said in another thread recently, in various ancestral lines I'm descended from immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents, with ancestry in four different countries (possibly five; we're not sure). My kids have two more countries in their own ancestries from my wife's side, and their respective spouses have even more countries in the mix, so any kids they have will be even more of a blend.)
> You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves.
I would say that, as a first generation immigrant, I'm viewing cultural change through a vantage point that most Americans lack. Most Americans have only arm's-length contact with immigrants; they aren't in a position to understand how their culture and values shape their behavior, including their political and civic behavior.
I don't deny that the immigrants are also changed in the process--I simply reject the assumption that the resulting amalgam is better. If you're Google, a two-way cultural exchange with a bunch of former IBM people isn't going to make your organization better.
And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tjgyWQ8nU. It would probably be even more orderly and well-run if it was still New Amsterdam and run by Dutch people.
> And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for
But then we have to wonder as well whether NYC and its surrounding environs would have evolved into the global capital of finance, culture, technology, etc., that it is.
We'll never know, for example, whether Bell Labs would have arisen in a region populated "mainly [by] people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for[.]"
And more generally: We'd have to wonder whether the U.S. would have, for example, twice led the rescue of Europe from German fascism and provided nearly 80 years of relative peace that has been labeled Pax Americana — or would an isolationist U.S. instead have led to even more domination of various countries by aggressors (see: Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin); warlords and their gangs (see: Somalia, Haiti, etc.); and xenophobic nationalists (see: Orbán, Modi, and their ilk).
Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather. Immigration is gonna happen; trying to stop it, using our available means, would cost more financially — and perhaps morally, for some crimes-against-humanity measures that can be imagined — than decent societies are willing to pay.
> But then we have to wonder as well whether NYC and its surrounding environs would have evolved into the global capital of finance, culture, technology, etc., that it is.
I don’t dispute that immigration enables ambitious people from all over the world who are anti-social enough to leave their homelands to come to America and make a lot of money. How you can bill that as a good thing is what I don’t understand. Ordinary Americans would be better off if NYC wasn’t the global capital of finance and technology. The Netherlands seems to be doing just fine being modestly less rich than America.
> Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather.
Immigration isn’t an inevitability, especially when your country stretches from coast to coast with a relatively narrow land border on the south side. Between 1910 and 1970, the US foreign-born population shrank from 15% to under 5%, even with the advent of the aviation industry. The subsequent growth of that figure was entirely a policy choice.
> Ordinary Americans would be better off if NYC wasn’t the global capital of finance and technology.
You seem to assume that the things you like about America would have come into being, and remained in existence, in the absence of the things you don't like. But history might suggest otherwise.
> The Netherlands seems to be doing just fine being modestly less rich than America.
Um: Absent the rich, mongrel United States and its industrial capacity, the folks in the Netherlands might well be speaking German as one of their official languages and still being ruled from Berlin. In late 1940, Germany had conquered basically all of western Europe and was not far from starving Britain into submission; U.S. aid helped keep the Brits afloat. Not even the Red Army would likely have defeated Germany without the U.S.'s so-called Arsenal of Democracy, which provided crucial materiel to the Soviets, helping them to avoid being conquered and colonized by the Third Reich — with their non-Aryan population turned into enslaved workers and/or intentionally starved to death (see: the Wannsee Protocol).
Or (continuing this alternative-history exercise), perhaps the Dutch would be speaking Russian after Stalin, Zhukov, et al., not only conquered Germany but rolled through Western Europe to the English Channel. But oh yes: The U.S.'s policy of containment — backstopped by its nuclear umbrella, the Marshall Plan for a time, and eventually the U.S-led NATO coalition — seems to have worked, buying time during which the Soviet Union finally collapsed of its own weight. Without U.S. economic might, it's doubtful that this would have happened.
For that matter, today's ambitious China likely wouldn't be a concern to our Dutch contemporaries either: China probably would have ended up as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, submissive to Tokyo. That didn't happen, again thanks to the wealthy, stupendously-productive United States.
The alternative-history conjectures above are just speculation, of course. Obviously, much change would have occurred in the decades since the end of WWII.
But your assertions have the ring of Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer wishful thinking.
> They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy.
I'd be curious to hear what you think is missing from the culture of Indians/Bangladeshis/Pakistanis that would preclude them from becoming part of an "egalitarian western democracy"?
You're asking the wrong question. Individual Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis can easily "become part of" a western democracy. The real question is how these immigrants can maintain and perpetuate an egalitarian western democracy. At the scale of immigration Canada and the US is experiencing, you can’t take for granted that the immigrants will simply maintain the kind of society that’s currently in place. Democracy doesn't arise from putting certain rules and constitutional structures down on paper. Instead, it’s the expression of the civic culture of a people.
That culture, in turn, isn’t about superficial stuff like food and language. Who wouldn’t think Indian food is a good thing? But what’s important to maintaining and perpetuating a democracy is deep culture. How do people in a culture view relations between people in society? On the sub-continent, we have an intensely hierarchical view of society, where we place great importance on people’s breeding (coming from a “good family”). Family ties and personal relationships, moreover, are much more important than abstract rules. People are much more willing to cover things up or bend rules to protect personal relationships than in the west, making the sub-continent a breeding ground for corruption. Asians, in general, come from societies that had millennia of large-scale imperial government. So the view of the relationship between the government and the individual is very different.
I'll give you a concrete example of the distinction. My family easily assimilated into the Virginia town where I grew up. That only means we can function—very successfully—within an environment where the norms are imposed by some other culture. We couldn’t recreate that environment. My mom can function in a society where norms of egalitarianism are imposed by a dominant culture. But that’s just not how she sees the world. She looks down on "the common people" and think that society should be governed top-down by people of good breeding and education. Because that’s a foundational assumption in our culture. And if suddenly 20% of the population were like my mom, the environment would become less egalitarian.
In fact, that's exactly what happened to my town. We went from being a quintessentially American middle class town to having a large number of affluent, educated Asians move in. And they completely changed the environment.
I think this is completely fair. For example, we have a saying "Old Dead White Men" and yet this country, it's laws, it's structure, is based on the ideas of old dead white men. It's a contradictory set of positions to hold to assure that people can immigrate and retain their identity - they are expected to even -, that this country's past is evil and should be undone, and yet also they should assimilate. We are told to ignore anything old dead white men created and yet we expect immigrants to come here and vaguely "assimilate". It's unclear what that even means. We find things like the melting pot analogy offensive and diversity is seen as a good thing. Doesn't that contradict assimilation? If diversity and assimilation are compatible, what does assimilation even mean? What commonality is required and why does it seem like this definition can easily be changed when suitable?
The only argument against this is to say that well "that's xenophobic". But I think this is just a way of ending the points made without discussing them because they cause discomfort. There are benefits to immigration but those benefits are not distributed evenly. It's also hard to benefit from immigration materially and politically but simultaneously say it's being done for humanitarian reasons and anyone opposed is just a bigot. It's easier to shut down debate than have to confront this.
I have noticed a lot more status/hierarchy jostling from immigrants who come from certain cultures. But I don't see that in their children who tend to have a much more western view of status/hierarchy.
When immigrants are heading towards 20% of the population, that first generation effect is significant. And don’t assume it disappears in subsequent generations. It’s hard as an outsider to tell, because you’re not privy to people’s thoughts or private communications.
The second generation Asian Americans I know aren’t quite as hierarchy-focused as say my parents. But they’re also nothing like my wife’s Oregonian family that’s been in the US for hundreds of years. (Among whom having status is almost something to be embarrassed about.)
