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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about.

Has it occurred to you that the difference might not be purely a matter of Europeans’ irrational “hangups” or “freakouts”, but might have a great deal to do with the actual nature of the specific immigrants each respective society is receiving? Over the last two decades, Europe has received a massive amount of unvetted, mostly unemployable “refugees” from the Middle East and Africa - many of whom are, plainly, the absolute criminal dregs of their countries of origin. Crime rates, unemployment, welfare usage, and other hallmarks of extreme dysfunction and parasitism are massively high among these people. So perhaps when Europeans are angry about their ever-increasing numbers, it’s not because Europeans are committed to the sort of extreme petty localism you attribute to them, but rather because they are accurately observing the extent to which these people are different in dangerous and overwhelmingly negative ways. (Hell, you brought up Gypsies and implied that Europeans irrationally “freak out” when a community of Gypsies shows up in town. Actually, the Gypsies have been consistently and widely reviled in Europe for many centuries now, because of their well-known extreme proclivity for stealing. In what sense is Gypsies’ lack of integration due to Europe “just not being as good at it as America is,” versus being a result of the actual qualities of Gypsies themselves and their compatibility/ability to be integrated?

As for why American appears to be “better at integrating immigrants”, again, so much of this is a result of the fact that for at least the last few decades, immigrating to America from anywhere other than Mexico was really difficult. America could be more restrictive about the types of people it let in, because it actually had the ability and political will to get rid of the people whom it didn’t want. This was not always the case! In fact, America’s “ability to successfully integrate immigrants” - again, I love the way this concept places the entire onus on the host society to integrate the immigrants, rather than on the immigrants to integrate themselves - has fluctuated pretty wildly throughout its history.

Famously, during the Gilded Age, America was receiving huge numbers of dirt-poor and very culturally-backward peasants from places like Italy, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crime rates in these communities were very high; violent crime skyrocketed in many American cities due to the rise of organized crime networks staffed nearly entirely by immigrants. Political extremism, including acts of outright terrorism committed by immigrants, also increased massively. Additionally, with the lack of any meaningful welfare state at the time, huge numbers of these immigrant men eventually just went home. They didn’t have any way to sustain themselves financially in America, so they packed it up and returned to Sicily or whatever. In 1924 America passed a very draconian immigration bill, and it is only after this point did unassimilated ethnic enclaves begin to dissolve in America due to their inability to sustain themselves with new immigration.

We are now seeing the beginning stages of a similar wave of extremely low-quality immigration start to take hold in America, due to the absolutely minimal border enforcement of the Biden administration. Hordes of immigrant men from all around the world - Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America - are streaming across the open border, and unlike a century ago, they will have a welfare state to utilize and the protection of powerful lobbies preventing their removal, allowing them to remain unemployed and thoroughly unassimilated. I predict that we will see a rapid shift to European levels of anti-immigrant sentiment as the new reality of this style of bio-trash immigration - the third world emptying its prisons into the United States - starts to dawn on people. (In fact, recent polling showing that a majority of Americans, including like 40% of Democrats, supporting mass deportations is strong evidence in favor of my prediction.)