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Certainly the scale of the immigration matters.
It's one thing to have 5% of your population be immigrants (1970, US). It's another thing for it to be 15-20% (US, today). And then there's Canada... (RIP).
And of course, the who matters just as much as the how many. Even though the Germans were assimilated into the US quite readily, African-Americans still haven't been assimilated after 300 years.
This seems ridiculous to me. I was in high school with 3rd gen Mexican immigrants. They dealt drugs to send to people in Mexico still. The only team sport they even considered participating in was soccer. And they didn't even do that because they would fail classes.
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Presumably, the ones who were still a "distinct ethnic group" in 1900 were not the ones that came over in 1800, but the ones that came over in 1890.
I think this is an important point.
The reason we have problems today is the same reason we had problems in 1910. The rate of immigration is just too damn high. Many pro-immigration people don't realize that U.S. immigration was not always high. Immigration was reduced to very low levels from roughly 1925-1965. The foreign born population fell from 15% to 5% during this period and all those hyphenated Americans became unhyphenated ones. Today the official % of immigrants is 15%, but the real number is likely more like 20%, marking a never before seen high water mark. We need to consolidate for a few decades. And it's going to take a lot longer to assimilate Somalians than it did Germans. Sorry, that's just the reality. Culture distance matters.
Note we needn't eliminate all immigration. Merely making our process less retarded will solve most of the issues.
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African-American culture has it's problems but it's American as all get out. It's basically just a shittier version of southern culture with worse 'music' and some fifties leftover ideas the rest of us figured out were bad ideas.
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It certainly hasn't been tried for 300 years though, considering forced segregation, Jim Crow and the like, it's maybe 60 years tops. You have to want to assimilate but also you have to be allowed to assimilate.
There's also the suggestion that they did absorb much of the culture around them hence the similarities with white Borderer culture.
I don’t know man. Italians who came over in 1910 were pretty damn assimilated by 1970. And black people in the north haven’t assimilated either despite centuries of opportunity.
Not really centuries though. If you are segregated you aren't going to assimilate into the culture you are segregated from.
"Restrictive covenants blocked black entry into many neighborhoods. Schools were openly segregated. Shopkeepers and theaters displayed “whites only” signs. Sugrue writes, “Even celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge and Marian Anderson had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they toured the North.”"
"In 1964, he tried to open public construction sites to black workers by suing New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, charging they were turning an unconstitutional blind eye on craft union discrimination. New York’s highest court, however, was unimpressed, ruling 7-0. But three years later, our office won a similar case in a federal trial court against Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes."
Even now many northern cities are de facto segregated, even if it does not have any legal backing. You can only assimilate into a culture if you are spending time in that culture (and that culture is willing to spend time with you). As mentioned by other's Italian-American culture only began to assimilate as other groups shared space with them.
African-American culture is the result of assimilation, it just wasn't assimilation into the broader American culture, but one picking up what little came across from Africa, plus from the poor borderers and the like they were surrounded by. It certainly isn't much like actual African cultures (hence why you get clashes between newer African immigrants and ADOS).
So now to assimilate them, you would have to have them exposed on a daily basis in and around the culture you want them to take on, and undo the previous behaviors that have been internalized. But that does have costs to the broader culture and there will be frictions due to historical racial grievances. Or to put it another way, very few people progressive or otherwise want black kids bussed into their schools, for quite understandable reasons in many cases. So we're stuck.
My wife is black and when I got to family events, I am usually the only white person there, or perhaps one other at most. When I stayed at her mother's house I might see one or two other white people within a couple of blocks. You can't assimilate to a culture you barely experience.
ADOS had a very different path to where they are now than any voluntary group of immigrants. So we shouldn't expect them to integrate in the same way.
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