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Count Canada too and central America is basically a rounding error.
I have been to India. Some of it looked better than Northern Virginia. At least the area I was working in when I was there.
Much of it was worse. But that's why I said middle class immigrants are great.
My daughter is in public school, less than half the kids in her class are white. She is also in girl scouts. It's about 1/3 each of White, Indian, and Hispanic. In both cases it's been fine. In the case of girl scouts I can't imagine a more American organization for little girls to join.
There are enclaves out there where people don't assimilate. Usually it's in New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name].
Poppycock. I've seen plenty of enclaves, both urban and rural, with distinctive ethnic and cultural differences despite having immigrated over a century prior.
No thank you.
I specifically claimed that there are enclaves where people don't assimilate. Often it is in cities. Your response: "poppycock [exactly what I just said]"
Honestly if you hadn't included the "poppycock" or the "no thank you" I would have thought you were just pointlessly agreeing with what I said.
The rural enclaves all end up speaking exclusively American English within a generation or two. They all heavily consume American culture. Many of them volunteer for the military at higher rates.
The urban enclaves I have a sense of "who gives a shit". They stay in a city and live out their lives in a weird half-in-half-out state. And their kids slowly abandon them to the wider much better culture and economy that is all around them. They have all the vibrancy and threat of a museum.
Is this where we ignore how Urban areas tend to have a great amount of political control over a state as a whole? Not exactly something I'd describe as 'vibrancy and threat of a museum'.
I don't really care how you think those rural enclaves act. It was my experience with them combined with looking at history over the past hundred years or so that shifted me more toward an immigration hardliner - you import the culture, you get the problems, regardless of what environment they're in. Import good culture, you get good outcome. Import bad culture, you get bad outcomes. That simple.
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Ah, the universal cop-out of "That's not true, except for the places it is, but I've decided they don't count." Speaking of Northern VA, I've seen unassimilated conclaves multiply exponentially over my 4 decades living there. Unassimilated Vietnamese pockets in Seven Corners, unassimilated South Korean pockets in Centreville, unassimilated Mexican pockets in Manassas, unassimilated Indians in Herndon. At certain point there is nothing to assimilate to anymore. In most of those towns native born whites are the minority. All of Northern VA in the 2020 census has a foreign born percentage of nearly 30%, far above what I believe would facilitate any sort of assimilation.
All I'm saying is, you done fucked up using my back yard as your example.
To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.
By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.
In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.
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See my girl scouts comment.
I think there is a reason the "anti-immigration is racist" argument has lived on for so long. Ultimately it feels like no metric is ever good enough to convince anyone when there are just too many brown people by their approximation.
I went to George Mason, I've lived in the area for over a decade. My parents grew up in Northern Virginia (but neither stayed there). I grew up in a slightly rural area of Virginia. I only really know the English language. Aside from the area not being as white as where I grew up it still feels very American to me. I've been to India and multiple countries in Europe, so I know what a foreign country feels like. There is a discomfort in not knowing the language, in missing so many of the basic cultural understandings of everyone around you, and of not having the grounding feeling of knowing people around you. Its a feeling, I acknowledge you can feel differently about things. But if we are just gonna go on vibes, then I'm telling you where my vibe is at.
So its not just "your" backyard. Its at best "our" backyard. Though I don't claim any form of ownership over the area despite having lived here and had parents that have grown up here. That is one of my ongoing frustration with anti-immigration viewpoints and woke viewpoints. You don't solely own the common spaces. You don't own the right to determine who and what is acceptable there. So much of what they said is kind of status jockeying to be like "well I am the ultimate american, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look" or "i am the ultimate oppressed victim, so i should get more say in how the common spaces look".
So, you are committed to just skipping over all the unassimilated pockets I mentioned? After you claimed they only exist in "New York in the neighborhood of Little [country name]"? This isn't a dick measuring contest about who's more American, it's a "You've point of fact lied" problem. I get why you want to just ignore that to the same degree you wanted to handwave away unassimilated pockets in the first place. But I'm not going to let you.
Yes, and that's exactly the feeling I get in the Eden Center at Seven Corners. In large sections of Manassas, and Centreville, and Herndon. It's bizarre having the place I grew up literally become a foreign country out from under me. I don't understand how you can look at those place, where they don't speak english, all the businesses aren't in english, nobody is dressing, speaking, or conducting themselves like Americans, and then say "Well they're selling thin mints so it all looks good to me. Nothing is as American as getting fucking fat."
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