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Any sort of tension will grow. I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.
First of all it erodes trust. No matter what the difference in question is, people will notice and keep score. They’ll notice when one of them does something to one of us. They’ll notice when governments start pandering to them at the expense of us. They’ll notice whether or not they are good citizens or not. And as this continues, trust in each other (is it safe to leave this thing in the open, or to leave access to valuable goods, or to allow access to something). It erodes trust in institutions that will be shown to favor one group over another, to unfairly enforce laws, or to attempt to shift culture in favor of them you no longer expect those institutions to be fair, neutral, or beneficial to your own people.
Second, it’s inevitable that one group member will actually act out on the simmering tension. He might be drunk, high, or unstable, but he will act out that tension. It might even be an event, a perceived government misstep that feeds the narrative that they don’t respect us. And with every such incident you ratchet up the tension as the competing narratives both get reinforced. The more Allah Akhbar events happen in Christmas markets, the more the narrative that Muslims are not like the rest of us is reinforced. But at the same time the backlash makes Muslims feel threatened. BLM was the same for American blacks and whites. Whites saw that blacks hated them, blacks saw that whites don’t care about them. Ratchet.
Third, if the differences in culture are big enough, there’s an erosion of common culture. Muslims and Christians don’t have the same ideas about a lot of things — what God is like, how you express faith, what the role of religion in the state is, what kinds of activities are allowed. And in many cases, you can’t compromise. There’s no compromise between “separation of church and state” and “Shariah or else.” So you can’t heal those divisions.
First of all I think us vs them is not some kind of inevitability or natural default state. It’s occasionally a helpful heuristic but also many times a harmful one. After all, you can slice any group any number of ways - granted, immigrants might have some notable clusters but I think viewing everything is an ethnic conflict lens is largely just an intellectual trap (for liberals and conservatives alike, horseshoe style).
Other than that, speaking about an “erosion of common culture” is ahistorical and a weird framing. Culture doesn’t have some kind of entropic principle where the inevitable state is chaos, disorder, and decay. Culture changes, and just like people it changes on its own even in the absence of other influences, due to the ever-present pressures of time and history. I think part of your misconception here too is that every cultural topic and belief is a binary scale. No! Ideas and concepts and practices merge and change and contort and remix in any number of degrees. It’s not like every single issue has a slider. Historians apply sliders as a post hoc analysis tool, but it is a grave error to see only the tool and take it at face value. The same thing happens in statistical modeling - just because a linear model works well doesn’t mean you can jump right to causal inference (imperfect analogy but idea of tools not necessarily representing the whole picture is still important).
Another part of your error seems to be an undercurrent of idealization. Like you mention ideas about God as clashing but the history of ideas about God even within ‘classic America’ have been anything but stable. Even the role of religion in America has fluctuated wildly, even in times without major immigration pressure. I’m not saying immigration has zero effect, but I am saying that more humility is needed. I see so many people make not only claims of outright cultural superiority, which I think is oversimplified but I don’t care too much about, but claims that they can somehow predict the exact way that a culture will mesh and change with another. No! Absolutely not! We can’t predict these things well, we’re not Hari Seldon. The beautiful and interesting and unpredictable change and melding of cultures and ideas and events doesn’t work on those simple levels, especially in the medium time scales we often discuss, especially here.
As an example, it might well be that despite seeming “incompatibility”, Islamic beliefs end up boosting general American church attendance even among Christians because the attitudes mix in a new and unpredictable way, rather than lead to some massive sectarian civil war, creating a third Great Awakening or something.
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The tension will only persist over long periods of time if the populations do not intermarry and remain distinct for generations due to self-segregation along religious or cultural lines e.g. Black and White Americans, Malays and Chinese in Malaysia, or the different castes in India. Note that even in those cases the situation has not spiraled out of control into a race war despite centuries of unfriendly interactions and close proximity. In other cases the groups will merge and any distinctions will fade away. In the US rates of intermarriage between Whites and every modern immigrant group will ensure this; it may be different with Muslim populations in Europe.
The question then becomes what is that new mixed population like and do we consider its creation a desirable outcome. In some cases we might consider the results neutral or positive e.g. your descendants become 5% Japanese, and in others we might consider them negative e.g. your descendants become 50% Haitian. Of course, some may reject all of these outcomes because they value racial purity in and of itself, at which point we reach an impasse.
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