I don't think you're going far enough on the mitigation of the dark side of multiculturalism. The only way America can healthily sustain high levels of immigration are to either only allow immigration from culturally similar/complementary like Western Europe or Japan/South Korea, or to insist upon assimilation on thick cultural dimensions (e.g. civics and ethics, vs. thin cultural dimensions like food and dress that don't really matter). Europe's failure to do this is costing them dearly, we've been insulated since our geographically natural migrant population (Latin Americans) is very culturally similar to Americans, but there are plenty of people a plane ride away who would love to come here for economic and safety reasons but have no real interest in becoming Americans if that means adopting what is a fundamentally historically Anglo-Protestant civic ethos. So as a country we need to either not let them come, or preferably let them come but insist on assimilation into the deep culture of American civic life.
It's not a simple question. I intend to write about this within the next few months, but in additional to just general social pressure other answers are re-instituting strong civics education in public schools and stopping anti-assimilation practices like publishing government documents in multiple languages. More broadly it's just about insisting that everyone follow basic American cultural norms and not letting people off the hook for doing so based on their ethnicity.
Yea, I've concluded lately that there should be no accommodation for people who chose to come here without learning English. Either learn it, or get yourself a friend, family member, or hired translator to translate for you.
I was thinking about this the other day. I agree that all primary government communication should be in English only. But translation is important to aid the assimilation process, so there needs to be a way for visitors & immigrants (two distinct categories) to access translation.
I’m also in favour of a minimal English comprehension required for voting
I wonder if publishing government documents English only is helpful or harmful to assimilation. If it's in your language and you read it, the government has just successfully told you something important. I don't think you're going to extrapolate from that to conclude "I don't need to learn English to live in Minnesota, I can get by entirely in Somali". (I live in Toronto. Looooots of immigrants here. Government documents are often in multiple languages, at least the headline message. People suck it up and learn English).
You wonder what kind of system could actually bring that about?
In the short and long run, less immigration. In the past assimilation came more or less naturally. Today, keeping in touch with the whole village requires a tap on one's phone - big difference. No need to learn English anymore, even. American citizenship is more than civics class. And it is highly prized - the evidence on this is how Americans are duped into false matrimony daily - to much heart ache.
In the end, citizens have to wise up to just how lucky they are to be born here and the laws about coming here must be enforced.
A culture must believe in its virtue or it won't pass those values on to its chidren, if it has children. The West has been convinced it is evil and that fraudsters and rapists are superior.
Another example of this is the western imposition of democracy in africa. you can't take cultures that have been built on chiefdoms and patronage systems for thousands of years and expect that they won't continue. so now you have countries with elections and parliaments, but resources are still often distributed along clan lines.
Equally bad to attempt forced conversions to our culture. One may legitimately use reason, but coercion never. Unless, of course you are willing to play the role of conqueror.
No. Assimilation is the voluntary adoption of a culture by a willing, or not so willing in some cases, immigrant. In our time it reflects the onscious decision of a person to move to and adopt or adapt to a new place and culture.
I’m enjoying the long awaited proof that my anti-multiculturalist streak was on target.
And I second the note that liberals are perfectly happy to make group disparagements about only one group: mine.
That habit is bringing about an emergent sense of unity among those of my group, a unity of which liberals (if they’re even noticing yet) will not approve.
There is a large block on the left that since at least the 90s has been trying to create a "white consciousness" among whites in America. What has been strange, to me, is in that attempt was an assumption was that it would be one of guilt and self-flagellation.
Now that they have succeeded in creating that white consciousness they are surprised it is rooted in pride and are completely confused.
These people truly boggle the mind. What did they *think* was going to come of their efforts? How could anyone really think self-hatred would be the end?
Sure, the midwits in universities are prone to this rot but *everyone*?
Multiculturalism without Assimilation is an experiment gone very wrong!
One thing that makes me scratch my head.....Why take an ethnic group of people who are accustomed to a hot/warm climate and relocate them in mass numbers to a state that has lots of cold weather and snow? That doesn't seem very "kind" to me. There has to be a reason that "We" don't know about. My gosh, when Abbott sent a bus load of S American border crossers to Martha's Vineyard, the blues were screaming about the cruelty of it all. Make it make sense.
Assimilation comes after immigration. First generation Italian immigrants, considered very much not white at the time and irredeemably Catholic, took a generation to learn English.
Though even before the Italians spoke English, there was a basic western cultural overlap. I grew up with great grand parents who immigrated from Sicily and their kids (my grandparents) were very American in most identifiable ways.
That was not the way it was viewed at the time. Catholics were viewed as threatening and alien to the American way of life. They we targeted by riots, subject to intimidation and violence. People thought they would be more loyal to the pope then the country. Extreme anti Catholic bias still exists in evangelical, Methodist and Baptist communities to this day.
True, and yet we can look back and see obvious similarities between Italians and their new countrymen. I don’t think we will look back at conservative Muslim immigrants and think, “yeah they really did assimilate well in hindsight!”
Maybe. I'd point out that, while I'm not expert in Islam, and there are many aspects of political Islam I find alarming, I've travelled widely enough to know that not all Muslims are alike... many of them wear their religion quite lightly (I could easily live in Jordan, for example). So a "conservative Muslim" might have some very "moderate Muslim" children. (this drama plays out over and over again in immigrant communities).
Maybe this reflects a society becoming "less Christian", but since I am a secular atheist to begin with, I don't care. I think that's where the heat of this argument might be coming from sometimes... Christians are low-key resentful at the sense Christianity is losing primacy in the West.
I’m also an atheist and while I find the secularization mostly good, we’ve also not replaced it with anything meaningful, sadly. That aside, I think we really should be screening for some kind of shared values. What that looks like in practice I have no idea (not a lawmaker innit), but I don’t think you could say that certain parts of Minnesota currently share a lot in common with western values.
As for the resentful Christians in your hypothesis, all things being equal, I would much rather live in a predominantly Christian country than a predominantly Muslim country, and I think you would probably agree with that even as a fellow atheist. (This has nothing to do with individuals and everything to do with how certain cultural ideas scale on the level of averages.)
It takes about 3 generations to fully assimilate. The idea of the old mass immigration was to live within like ethnic communities while assimilating. What we have now is just mass immigration without concern for the "American" way of life and the "melting pot" theory.
It's also true that they were not an entirely foreign culture and certainly not in opposition. As Christian heritage, there was far more shared than not.
Enjoyed the piece, thank you. Unfortunately, I don't trust the Left to enforce the standards that you have outlined here. There are too many baizuos among them.
A thoughtful essay. A key point is that you appear to believe that the Somalis can be easily reprogrammed to play by western rules. I'm not at all sure that that is the case.
Clan loyalty is a foundational aspect of who these people are, so I suspect that they'll nod and smile and say "Oh yes, sure, I now understand that pillaging the welfare system at the expense of hungry children is wrong, and I won't do that no more". And they'll simply carry on as before, while ensuring that their scams become more sophisticated and harder to detect.
It's the story of the scorpion and the frog, in real life.
"There’s a strange conceit in the developed world that ethical programming operates separately to cultural programming. That yes, we might have different religions and languages and landscapes and customs, but underneath it all, we adhere to the same, shared sense of right and wrong.
This is not true. It is not true at all."
If that's the case then it calls into question a lot of the existing multilateral institutions and norms, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the UN and the Geneva Conventions.
Westerners have this peculiar notion that their own culturally specific values are actually universal and not contingent on the historic religion of the West, from which those values originally derived.
Multiculturalism smuggles in relativism - and so it is bound to fail. It may be true that the Egyptian cabbie will lose no sleep over cheating you blind, but he still cheated you. It's still wrong even if his culture tells him it's not.
Ultimately, multiculturalism fails because it fails to recognize that there is "capital T" Truth, whether you like it or not. Some cultures have more of that Truth than others. Nobody has a monopoly on it, but there are certainly some societies that are closer to it.
Ultimately, I think this also comes down to religion, which is the foundation of truth. Differences in religion are often downplayed, even though they form the basis for the worldview that becomes your ethical system.
Excellent essay. With regard to Walz- I think the guy has a verbal diarrhea problem. He doesn’t think about what he says ahead of time, and he isn’t that bright on top of it.
Our Good/Bad morality system is really very rare. Most of the world's morality is based on benefits to the clan. In some places it would be considered perfectly moral to rob and kill someone in order to distribute their resources to your family. In many places, it's considered proper to physically harm someone who damages your family's honor. We get snippets of the consequences of these sometimes in the news, but I guess it's hard for people to truly understand worldviews that aren't their own. Relevant, India's Izzat system, and Palestines Hamula system.
The Chinese rule is this: all bureaucrats are corrupt; they just shouldn't take more than they are worth which is an actual moral distinction. Somalis I know less well but for two cultural features: they have clan groups and they are Muslim. Therefore, the "us" versus "them" distinction is, shall we say, alien to north Americans.
Conservatives tend to me more parochial, and progressives more universal.
However, the larger progressive universe has a "donut hole"--that is, they care more about distant groups than nearby parochial groups; not a true "universalism". This is the Achilles' heel that people from certain regions exploit when it comes to defrauding state programs; that is, they use the vulnerability that progressives will be more concerned with those from "afar" over parochial needs to their advantage.
The progressive cope is that an abundance mindset enables concern about both the parochial and the more distant simultaneously and not merely the parochial, and that that is a mark of personal development, growth, maturity, and morality. Sounds good in theory. Of course, in a world with scarce resources (ref. Economics 101) this isn't always possible, and one of the two get short shrift.
Dude, just be racist. They are 80 IQ cousin fuckers. Of course they were going to behave this way. And of course we should have prevented them from coming and should be deporting them as fast as we can.
The Dems in MN run cover for these people because they ask local pols who will get the most loot for them and then vote 90/10 or higher in their favor. It's not all that different than how African Americans vote.
We are a rules based society. My take on Minnesota and the Somalis was that the politicians permitted the fraud to extract votes whether that was explicit or just expected. Bleeding Heart syndrome tolerated it. I would bet that the needs of the immigrants could have been met within the confines of the rules. I also believe that after the prosecutions and penalties are awarded and the rules enforced, the somalis will have moved a few steps closer towards assimilation.
Nice story David. You are very kind. You clearly have the benefit of a nice life and can, with that accumulated experience articulate and explain certain social / cultural differences. Thankyou.
I don't think you're going far enough on the mitigation of the dark side of multiculturalism. The only way America can healthily sustain high levels of immigration are to either only allow immigration from culturally similar/complementary like Western Europe or Japan/South Korea, or to insist upon assimilation on thick cultural dimensions (e.g. civics and ethics, vs. thin cultural dimensions like food and dress that don't really matter). Europe's failure to do this is costing them dearly, we've been insulated since our geographically natural migrant population (Latin Americans) is very culturally similar to Americans, but there are plenty of people a plane ride away who would love to come here for economic and safety reasons but have no real interest in becoming Americans if that means adopting what is a fundamentally historically Anglo-Protestant civic ethos. So as a country we need to either not let them come, or preferably let them come but insist on assimilation into the deep culture of American civic life.
I think importing South Korea’s cultural attitudes on crime is a win-win.
It's a good idea to insist on assimilation on values and civics. I wonder what kind of system could actually bring that about, though.
A test? People would just figure out what the "right" answers are and lie.
It's not a simple question. I intend to write about this within the next few months, but in additional to just general social pressure other answers are re-instituting strong civics education in public schools and stopping anti-assimilation practices like publishing government documents in multiple languages. More broadly it's just about insisting that everyone follow basic American cultural norms and not letting people off the hook for doing so based on their ethnicity.
Yea, I've concluded lately that there should be no accommodation for people who chose to come here without learning English. Either learn it, or get yourself a friend, family member, or hired translator to translate for you.
I'll watch for the article.
“Multiple languages”
I was thinking about this the other day. I agree that all primary government communication should be in English only. But translation is important to aid the assimilation process, so there needs to be a way for visitors & immigrants (two distinct categories) to access translation.
I’m also in favour of a minimal English comprehension required for voting
I wonder if publishing government documents English only is helpful or harmful to assimilation. If it's in your language and you read it, the government has just successfully told you something important. I don't think you're going to extrapolate from that to conclude "I don't need to learn English to live in Minnesota, I can get by entirely in Somali". (I live in Toronto. Looooots of immigrants here. Government documents are often in multiple languages, at least the headline message. People suck it up and learn English).
You wonder what kind of system could actually bring that about?
In the short and long run, less immigration. In the past assimilation came more or less naturally. Today, keeping in touch with the whole village requires a tap on one's phone - big difference. No need to learn English anymore, even. American citizenship is more than civics class. And it is highly prized - the evidence on this is how Americans are duped into false matrimony daily - to much heart ache.
In the end, citizens have to wise up to just how lucky they are to be born here and the laws about coming here must be enforced.
A culture must believe in its virtue or it won't pass those values on to its chidren, if it has children. The West has been convinced it is evil and that fraudsters and rapists are superior.
Another example of this is the western imposition of democracy in africa. you can't take cultures that have been built on chiefdoms and patronage systems for thousands of years and expect that they won't continue. so now you have countries with elections and parliaments, but resources are still often distributed along clan lines.
Equally bad to attempt forced conversions to our culture. One may legitimately use reason, but coercion never. Unless, of course you are willing to play the role of conqueror.
It’s not really playing the role of conquerer when they came here willingly.
Not sure what you are saying in light of the comment to which I responded.
Are you not trying to portray assimilation as a forced conversion and then equating it to conquering people?
No. Assimilation is the voluntary adoption of a culture by a willing, or not so willing in some cases, immigrant. In our time it reflects the onscious decision of a person to move to and adopt or adapt to a new place and culture.
Forced conversion is what Islam does.
I think we are on the same page then and just getting wires crossed
I’m enjoying the long awaited proof that my anti-multiculturalist streak was on target.
And I second the note that liberals are perfectly happy to make group disparagements about only one group: mine.
That habit is bringing about an emergent sense of unity among those of my group, a unity of which liberals (if they’re even noticing yet) will not approve.
There is a large block on the left that since at least the 90s has been trying to create a "white consciousness" among whites in America. What has been strange, to me, is in that attempt was an assumption was that it would be one of guilt and self-flagellation.
Now that they have succeeded in creating that white consciousness they are surprised it is rooted in pride and are completely confused.
These people truly boggle the mind. What did they *think* was going to come of their efforts? How could anyone really think self-hatred would be the end?
Sure, the midwits in universities are prone to this rot but *everyone*?
That was more or less my thought the first time I heard someone from UMass expound the idea 30 years ago.
I think my phrasing was “be careful what you wish for”.
Multiculturalism without Assimilation is an experiment gone very wrong!
One thing that makes me scratch my head.....Why take an ethnic group of people who are accustomed to a hot/warm climate and relocate them in mass numbers to a state that has lots of cold weather and snow? That doesn't seem very "kind" to me. There has to be a reason that "We" don't know about. My gosh, when Abbott sent a bus load of S American border crossers to Martha's Vineyard, the blues were screaming about the cruelty of it all. Make it make sense.
Making sense isn’t in the leftist playbook.
Assimilation comes after immigration. First generation Italian immigrants, considered very much not white at the time and irredeemably Catholic, took a generation to learn English.
Though even before the Italians spoke English, there was a basic western cultural overlap. I grew up with great grand parents who immigrated from Sicily and their kids (my grandparents) were very American in most identifiable ways.
That was not the way it was viewed at the time. Catholics were viewed as threatening and alien to the American way of life. They we targeted by riots, subject to intimidation and violence. People thought they would be more loyal to the pope then the country. Extreme anti Catholic bias still exists in evangelical, Methodist and Baptist communities to this day.
True, and yet we can look back and see obvious similarities between Italians and their new countrymen. I don’t think we will look back at conservative Muslim immigrants and think, “yeah they really did assimilate well in hindsight!”
Maybe. I'd point out that, while I'm not expert in Islam, and there are many aspects of political Islam I find alarming, I've travelled widely enough to know that not all Muslims are alike... many of them wear their religion quite lightly (I could easily live in Jordan, for example). So a "conservative Muslim" might have some very "moderate Muslim" children. (this drama plays out over and over again in immigrant communities).
Maybe this reflects a society becoming "less Christian", but since I am a secular atheist to begin with, I don't care. I think that's where the heat of this argument might be coming from sometimes... Christians are low-key resentful at the sense Christianity is losing primacy in the West.
I’m also an atheist and while I find the secularization mostly good, we’ve also not replaced it with anything meaningful, sadly. That aside, I think we really should be screening for some kind of shared values. What that looks like in practice I have no idea (not a lawmaker innit), but I don’t think you could say that certain parts of Minnesota currently share a lot in common with western values.
As for the resentful Christians in your hypothesis, all things being equal, I would much rather live in a predominantly Christian country than a predominantly Muslim country, and I think you would probably agree with that even as a fellow atheist. (This has nothing to do with individuals and everything to do with how certain cultural ideas scale on the level of averages.)
It takes about 3 generations to fully assimilate. The idea of the old mass immigration was to live within like ethnic communities while assimilating. What we have now is just mass immigration without concern for the "American" way of life and the "melting pot" theory.
It's also true that they were not an entirely foreign culture and certainly not in opposition. As Christian heritage, there was far more shared than not.
Enjoyed the piece, thank you. Unfortunately, I don't trust the Left to enforce the standards that you have outlined here. There are too many baizuos among them.
You mean everyone in the world isn’t just like me? Well, I never. That is just right wing misinformation, straight up.
A thoughtful essay. A key point is that you appear to believe that the Somalis can be easily reprogrammed to play by western rules. I'm not at all sure that that is the case.
Clan loyalty is a foundational aspect of who these people are, so I suspect that they'll nod and smile and say "Oh yes, sure, I now understand that pillaging the welfare system at the expense of hungry children is wrong, and I won't do that no more". And they'll simply carry on as before, while ensuring that their scams become more sophisticated and harder to detect.
It's the story of the scorpion and the frog, in real life.
"There’s a strange conceit in the developed world that ethical programming operates separately to cultural programming. That yes, we might have different religions and languages and landscapes and customs, but underneath it all, we adhere to the same, shared sense of right and wrong.
This is not true. It is not true at all."
If that's the case then it calls into question a lot of the existing multilateral institutions and norms, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the UN and the Geneva Conventions.
Funny how that works, innit?
Westerners have this peculiar notion that their own culturally specific values are actually universal and not contingent on the historic religion of the West, from which those values originally derived.
Multiculturalism smuggles in relativism - and so it is bound to fail. It may be true that the Egyptian cabbie will lose no sleep over cheating you blind, but he still cheated you. It's still wrong even if his culture tells him it's not.
Ultimately, multiculturalism fails because it fails to recognize that there is "capital T" Truth, whether you like it or not. Some cultures have more of that Truth than others. Nobody has a monopoly on it, but there are certainly some societies that are closer to it.
Ultimately, I think this also comes down to religion, which is the foundation of truth. Differences in religion are often downplayed, even though they form the basis for the worldview that becomes your ethical system.
Excellent essay. With regard to Walz- I think the guy has a verbal diarrhea problem. He doesn’t think about what he says ahead of time, and he isn’t that bright on top of it.
and he was getting a cut of the fraud.
Our Good/Bad morality system is really very rare. Most of the world's morality is based on benefits to the clan. In some places it would be considered perfectly moral to rob and kill someone in order to distribute their resources to your family. In many places, it's considered proper to physically harm someone who damages your family's honor. We get snippets of the consequences of these sometimes in the news, but I guess it's hard for people to truly understand worldviews that aren't their own. Relevant, India's Izzat system, and Palestines Hamula system.
The Chinese rule is this: all bureaucrats are corrupt; they just shouldn't take more than they are worth which is an actual moral distinction. Somalis I know less well but for two cultural features: they have clan groups and they are Muslim. Therefore, the "us" versus "them" distinction is, shall we say, alien to north Americans.
Parochialism vs universalism.
Here's a pretty good primer: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0
And here is another take: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-most-important-idea-in-current
Conservatives tend to me more parochial, and progressives more universal.
However, the larger progressive universe has a "donut hole"--that is, they care more about distant groups than nearby parochial groups; not a true "universalism". This is the Achilles' heel that people from certain regions exploit when it comes to defrauding state programs; that is, they use the vulnerability that progressives will be more concerned with those from "afar" over parochial needs to their advantage.
The progressive cope is that an abundance mindset enables concern about both the parochial and the more distant simultaneously and not merely the parochial, and that that is a mark of personal development, growth, maturity, and morality. Sounds good in theory. Of course, in a world with scarce resources (ref. Economics 101) this isn't always possible, and one of the two get short shrift.
Dude, just be racist. They are 80 IQ cousin fuckers. Of course they were going to behave this way. And of course we should have prevented them from coming and should be deporting them as fast as we can.
The Dems in MN run cover for these people because they ask local pols who will get the most loot for them and then vote 90/10 or higher in their favor. It's not all that different than how African Americans vote.
We are a rules based society. My take on Minnesota and the Somalis was that the politicians permitted the fraud to extract votes whether that was explicit or just expected. Bleeding Heart syndrome tolerated it. I would bet that the needs of the immigrants could have been met within the confines of the rules. I also believe that after the prosecutions and penalties are awarded and the rules enforced, the somalis will have moved a few steps closer towards assimilation.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
Nice story David. You are very kind. You clearly have the benefit of a nice life and can, with that accumulated experience articulate and explain certain social / cultural differences. Thankyou.