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And yet people who came to the US voluntarily as settlers and not asylum seekers integrated themselves just fine, even when they came as huddled masses. If you keep stirring, your sauce emulsifies just fine. The French state used to stir hard and actually blended most of the local ethnicities into the French nation. It could've done the same to the Algerians: ban the use of Arabic, force the migrants to take French names, break up and resettle any ethnic enclaves.
There was no assimilation. The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians. We can't imagine an America where the European population remained 70% Anglo, but it would certainly be a very different place.
Oh, yes, I remember reading about the terrible places that Boston and Philadelphia have become after being invaded by the Catholics and the Jews. /s
What exactly went wrong with Boston and Philly? Bossism? I wouldn't lay the blame solely at the Catholic feet. William Tweed, arguably the most notorious political boss, was a Scottish Quaker,
I’m not saying they got “worse”, clearly by many metrics (not least GDP/capita) America is much better than it was in 1840. But it is different. The Irish and Italians did not become Anglos, they didn’t become English or Scots-Irish or whatever. They established their own communities that slowly blended together with other white ethnics and the pre-existing (largely British) cultures in the US which itself over time gave way to modern American identity and culture. The social fabric that once existed disappeared, it was its own culture war at the end of the 19th century, the people of the time saw it happening, they lamented it. It was damaging in the sense that the old culture of those cities ceased to exist, vanished no less surely than the culture of Ottoman Greeks or German Ostsiedler. And sure, the presence of European immigrants in urban organized crime in the early 20th century was obviously substantial.
That the largely new country, new nation that adopted the name and flag and constitution of the USA ended up being wealthy and powerful and generally a good place to live is indeed fortunate, but it doesn’t mean the old America did not fade away.
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Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
They have “assimilated” in the sense of intermarriage (by this measure Brazil’s the all-time greatest success of diversity), but they didn’t adopt Anglo culture, they changed it to accommodate many of their own mores, habits and ideas.
Wait, so fourth generation Americans in Boston who add a lilt to their voices as they get drunker are actually just Irish because they don't pointedly refuse to talk about their divorces and put jam on their peanut butter sandwiches instead of marshmallow fluff?
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Yet race is a constant major topic in the US that hasn't been solved despite decades of trying. There are vast differences in outcome, there is high level of segregation, there are large differences in crime. What would even be the point of removing all Algerian elements from Algerians? Why go through a massive social engineering process to try to strip people of their culture?
Social harmony, of course. And the US doesn't have a problem with race, it has a problem with the descendants of slaves. Their arrival wasn't voluntary, so it's not surprising their segregation was able to prevent successful assimilation.
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