This aligns with genetics. Namely, someone from southern Italy is more closely related to someone from Scotland than they are to someone from the middle east, despite outward appearance.
People from Southern Italy are actually closer to people across the Med in Tunisia and Libya than they are to Scots. I guess if you really meant "the middle east", ie Saudi Arabia, etc.., then the difference is greater, but that's a large, ill-defined region.
Southern Italy and North Africa were both part of Rome for many hundreds of years.
Now I don't understand you. What I'm saying is the differences between Europeans are slight in terms of ancestral relatedness compared to the gap between all of them and middle eastern people's.
This post is missing how quickly all groups are assimilating due to marriage and baby-making. About 40% of 2nd-generation Asian and Hispanic people have children with another ethnic class, and among Blacks that number is getting closer to 25%, and still rising, fast.
Anyways, I enjoy this Substack's approach to analysis and data, but the editorializing angles are sometimes off for me. Whether assimilation is "fast" or "slow" is subjective, because those terms are subjective. Just showing that certain assimilation angles might be slower than many think doesn't mean assimilation is entirely a myth.
Sorry, I never got around to writing specifically about this. I've been invested in other projects and forgot about it.
I don't know if there's enough to say to warrant a full piece. My short answer is that I agree that intermarriage is the process that (almost by definition) results in assimilation (though it's not unidirectional; with continued intermarriage the two groups will converge by both moving closer to each other).
To be more precise, I'll add the caveat that my piece should be considered a discussion of the degree of assimilation in the absence of genetic intermingling/shared familial transmission.
All fair and good points. I will note that this does often seem to boil down to time and critical mass. Mexicans never really stayed in significant quantities to form while neighborhoods that also had mass citizenship for quite a while if I recall, unless it was so close to the border like in the Rio grande valley that those towns were desperately poor anyway. Jim Crow surely had a massive impact on blacks until relatively recently. So sure the lack of progress since say the 1960s is a sign assimilation also may fail but that's not to say it won't eventually get there. Candidly I think intermarriage is part of the key. Italians and Irish moved in sufficient numbers they could provide wholesale support systems down to the church from eventually the bank. They also moved to industrial hotspots far earlier than any blacks or Mexicans did, which I think also is a contributing factor. Again, not really disagreeing just think there is important context to also note.
The latest data I've seen is that 1/4 of non-immigrant Blacks, and 40% of Hispanics and Asians have children outside of their ethnicity. I forget the specific Native American number but it's even higher.
Now, maybe all of these couplings are within Socio-Economic classes, and in that sense InquisitiveBird's points may still stand. But in terms of ethnic groups, the current data is showing an acceleration.
Also, one could argue that the Germans were forcefully assimilated when wilson took the U.S. into WW1. all those German cultural associations were suppressed, etc. there’s still scattered echoes of it in the East Village and Upoer East Side, where the Germans were clustered.
Wow. I just got nostalgic for NYC. well, it was great fun in the nineties. The last hurrah of the old Irish New York City that I came to love so well.
Those are great points. about Mexicans, though, there are the Tejanos, west and south Texas (i’m thinking of towns like Uvalde, southwest of the Hill Country.) These are Mexicans who are basically good ole boys. The South can defy expectations as well. It’s a lot more nuanced than Jim Crow. but yeah, context, etc. matters
The Telles and Ortiz longitudinal study of Mexican-Americans does not account for the possibility that unlike today, three and four generations ago financially successful Mexican-Americans strived to move away from their ethnic brethren. So the fourth generation left over for the study was essentially not the same group as the first. Possible sampling error.
I'd be surprised if that's changed over time. Financially successful Mexican-Americans still move to upper-income areas. And given that among just the 2nd generation, intermarriage rates are around 40% and are surely as high or higher in the 3rd+ generation, there are probably not a ton of 4th generation Mexican-Americans to sample outside of a few heavily Mexican-American areas.
Fail to look to the origins of immigrants at your peril. Implications hammer naive multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. (If more evidence were needed!)
Contra Clark if the descendants of swedish nobles are now doctors and lawyers doesn't mean that they have the same social status. Medieval nobles formed the political, military, social and even religious elite. Doctors are upper middle class.
Black migration to the US is both old and massive.
I'm more interested in assimilation of voting pattern and culture than income. The Ellis Islanders still haven't started voting majority-GOP like the heritage American whites do.
We might not be able to assume that return migration was a failure to assimilate, as if eventual assimilation was always the only goal of immigration. For instance, another goal could have been economic opportunism (work in the U.S. for a while to earn some money, then go back home to settle down). IIRC this was quite common among Italian and French Canadian immigrants before WWI, and among seasonal workers from Mexico before it became harder to go back and forth across the border.
If we put aside the recent swarm of immigrants who are less likely to assimilate. The various groups that settled in America are a far cry from any of their ancestors. I would argue that there is an American non-culture (consumerist culture) which dominates the land. This provides what seems like assimilation, but it's actually the degradation of all cultures involved.
The same kind of argument could be made for the movement of through the interactions of groups differing between one another in any way. You can find crime and cultural assimilation issues with regards to rural classes moving into richer areas, as in Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution! The question policymakers pose is whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks…and of course there is a class bias in answering that!
Genetic differences between ethnic groups and their cultural results well known and accepted scientifically - they just aren't allowed to be discussed and studied. Occasionally, scientifically documented books/papers are published and the authors excoriated and branded racist for noticing: Nicolas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance"; Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Arthur Jensen's many studies and publications. That they're troublesome doesn't make them less scientific, less valid or less real.
This is a great piece. generational persistence makes sense. I’m a native of the Deep South, ancestral origins West of England. when I lived in NYC I sort of naturally fell in with the Irish. These were guys who worked in Wall Street, dads were cops or firemen, people came over in the famine years. The Celt in my lineage is mainly Welsh and Cornish, but we “thought” the same, with the same sort of instinctual ideas about honor. Those guys are still my best friends. I made great Italian and Jewish friends but there isn’t the familiarity as there is with the Irish. (Who are imo the best people in the world but that’s just me).
This shows how out of touch with reality Richard Hanania and other Classical Liberal are about assimilation into Western Civilization
And their view also misses that expecting assimilation is not at all liberal
This aligns with genetics. Namely, someone from southern Italy is more closely related to someone from Scotland than they are to someone from the middle east, despite outward appearance.
People from Southern Italy are actually closer to people across the Med in Tunisia and Libya than they are to Scots. I guess if you really meant "the middle east", ie Saudi Arabia, etc.., then the difference is greater, but that's a large, ill-defined region.
Southern Italy and North Africa were both part of Rome for many hundreds of years.
What you said does not make sense.
You are comparing a region of country (Southern Italy) with a country (Scotland) with an entire complicated region(Middle east).
From what I am aware of if you compare anatolian turk,syrians and lebanese they are definitely closer to that.
Now I don't understand you. What I'm saying is the differences between Europeans are slight in terms of ancestral relatedness compared to the gap between all of them and middle eastern people's.
But you took the wrong example with south italy
The studies demonstrate remarkable distance, even between Sicilians and West Asians.
This post is missing how quickly all groups are assimilating due to marriage and baby-making. About 40% of 2nd-generation Asian and Hispanic people have children with another ethnic class, and among Blacks that number is getting closer to 25%, and still rising, fast.
Anyways, I enjoy this Substack's approach to analysis and data, but the editorializing angles are sometimes off for me. Whether assimilation is "fast" or "slow" is subjective, because those terms are subjective. Just showing that certain assimilation angles might be slower than many think doesn't mean assimilation is entirely a myth.
The author totally missed the ethnic attrition literature, which is covers assimilation through intermarriage.
The author told me he was going to address that in a follow up post and never did.
Sorry, I never got around to writing specifically about this. I've been invested in other projects and forgot about it.
I don't know if there's enough to say to warrant a full piece. My short answer is that I agree that intermarriage is the process that (almost by definition) results in assimilation (though it's not unidirectional; with continued intermarriage the two groups will converge by both moving closer to each other).
To be more precise, I'll add the caveat that my piece should be considered a discussion of the degree of assimilation in the absence of genetic intermingling/shared familial transmission.
All fair and good points. I will note that this does often seem to boil down to time and critical mass. Mexicans never really stayed in significant quantities to form while neighborhoods that also had mass citizenship for quite a while if I recall, unless it was so close to the border like in the Rio grande valley that those towns were desperately poor anyway. Jim Crow surely had a massive impact on blacks until relatively recently. So sure the lack of progress since say the 1960s is a sign assimilation also may fail but that's not to say it won't eventually get there. Candidly I think intermarriage is part of the key. Italians and Irish moved in sufficient numbers they could provide wholesale support systems down to the church from eventually the bank. They also moved to industrial hotspots far earlier than any blacks or Mexicans did, which I think also is a contributing factor. Again, not really disagreeing just think there is important context to also note.
"Candidly I think intermarriage is part of the key".
I agree because it's hard to argue that people are "unassimilated" when their parents are of two different groups. And interracial marriage is increasing in the US and even accelerating: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
The latest data I've seen is that 1/4 of non-immigrant Blacks, and 40% of Hispanics and Asians have children outside of their ethnicity. I forget the specific Native American number but it's even higher.
Now, maybe all of these couplings are within Socio-Economic classes, and in that sense InquisitiveBird's points may still stand. But in terms of ethnic groups, the current data is showing an acceleration.
Also, one could argue that the Germans were forcefully assimilated when wilson took the U.S. into WW1. all those German cultural associations were suppressed, etc. there’s still scattered echoes of it in the East Village and Upoer East Side, where the Germans were clustered.
Wow. I just got nostalgic for NYC. well, it was great fun in the nineties. The last hurrah of the old Irish New York City that I came to love so well.
Those are great points. about Mexicans, though, there are the Tejanos, west and south Texas (i’m thinking of towns like Uvalde, southwest of the Hill Country.) These are Mexicans who are basically good ole boys. The South can defy expectations as well. It’s a lot more nuanced than Jim Crow. but yeah, context, etc. matters
The Telles and Ortiz longitudinal study of Mexican-Americans does not account for the possibility that unlike today, three and four generations ago financially successful Mexican-Americans strived to move away from their ethnic brethren. So the fourth generation left over for the study was essentially not the same group as the first. Possible sampling error.
I'd be surprised if that's changed over time. Financially successful Mexican-Americans still move to upper-income areas. And given that among just the 2nd generation, intermarriage rates are around 40% and are surely as high or higher in the 3rd+ generation, there are probably not a ton of 4th generation Mexican-Americans to sample outside of a few heavily Mexican-American areas.
Fail to look to the origins of immigrants at your peril. Implications hammer naive multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. (If more evidence were needed!)
Contra Clark if the descendants of swedish nobles are now doctors and lawyers doesn't mean that they have the same social status. Medieval nobles formed the political, military, social and even religious elite. Doctors are upper middle class.
Black migration to the US is both old and massive.
I'm more interested in assimilation of voting pattern and culture than income. The Ellis Islanders still haven't started voting majority-GOP like the heritage American whites do.
We might not be able to assume that return migration was a failure to assimilate, as if eventual assimilation was always the only goal of immigration. For instance, another goal could have been economic opportunism (work in the U.S. for a while to earn some money, then go back home to settle down). IIRC this was quite common among Italian and French Canadian immigrants before WWI, and among seasonal workers from Mexico before it became harder to go back and forth across the border.
If we put aside the recent swarm of immigrants who are less likely to assimilate. The various groups that settled in America are a far cry from any of their ancestors. I would argue that there is an American non-culture (consumerist culture) which dominates the land. This provides what seems like assimilation, but it's actually the degradation of all cultures involved.
The same kind of argument could be made for the movement of through the interactions of groups differing between one another in any way. You can find crime and cultural assimilation issues with regards to rural classes moving into richer areas, as in Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution! The question policymakers pose is whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks…and of course there is a class bias in answering that!
Genetic differences between ethnic groups and their cultural results well known and accepted scientifically - they just aren't allowed to be discussed and studied. Occasionally, scientifically documented books/papers are published and the authors excoriated and branded racist for noticing: Nicolas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance"; Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Arthur Jensen's many studies and publications. That they're troublesome doesn't make them less scientific, less valid or less real.
So basically The Great Prophecy of Integration is total bullshit.
Whenever I ask why do you support immigration? Why do you want to surround our children with racial and cultural adversaries?
The answer is always the same: Don't worry according to The Great Prophecy of Integration everything will work out.
And now we know that leftist religious bullshit is indeed bullshit.
Why no mention of ethnic attrition?
This is a great piece. generational persistence makes sense. I’m a native of the Deep South, ancestral origins West of England. when I lived in NYC I sort of naturally fell in with the Irish. These were guys who worked in Wall Street, dads were cops or firemen, people came over in the famine years. The Celt in my lineage is mainly Welsh and Cornish, but we “thought” the same, with the same sort of instinctual ideas about honor. Those guys are still my best friends. I made great Italian and Jewish friends but there isn’t the familiarity as there is with the Irish. (Who are imo the best people in the world but that’s just me).
Reminds me of a Steve Sailer or National Review article from the 90s. Way retro.