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Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.
The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.
The latter are a case of broad cultural assimilation except for sticking points that are unlikely to ever be sanded down in the near future, because of HBD or culture (I strongly think the former).
I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.
This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
Our east asian and european immigrants are also doing great. Don't need any advice for them, they took to the forceful assimilation well. I know a son of vietnamese immigrants, he was almost too patriotic. Funny, smart kid, but when he asked for the french flag to be flown on bastille day at the school, people rolled their eyes. He's a tank officer in the french army now (he's short). The french do not have a problem with this kind of frenchman, they love him. Whatever 'ethnic french racism' there is has never made him burn a school.
Maybe increase welfare, since the root cause for senseless destruction must be poverty and lack of chances? It's already higher than yours.
Are you sure you didn't reverse your reasoning process here? You first look at which groups do badly, and then assume their treatment must be terrible.
Consider the possibility that they were treated the same - they had access to free school and university, generous welfare, a passably functioning job market - , and yet still behaved in a dramatically opposite manner as the vietnamese and europeans.
I think the more interesting comparison is between MENA immigrants in France and Mexican/Central American immigrants in the US. The US also has significantly poorer, more violent, and less stable countries to the south that send a large inflow of unfiltered, not always legal immigration. However, these immigrant populations assimilate well and do not cause nearly the same problems as MENA immigrants in France. Clearly something is working with the American system that is not working in France. Even other places in Europe do better than France---Vienna seems to assimilate immigrants just fine for example.
One possible explanation is that the French idea that you can just by law declare that everyone is the same and then forget about race is hopelessly naïve. However much you claim everyone is equally French, some people are going to just look dramatically different. The way human nature is, unless you take serious effort to educate people about the reality of race and discrimination and actively pass explicitly race-based policies to counteract it, de facto, social discrimination is going to make it impossible for immigrants to assimilate no matter what the laws from up high actually say. However well the law treats them, civil society is not going to treat them well. Who cares if you have the same access to welfare and schooling if no one will hire you or rent you an apartment in a nice neighborhood? If the teachers are horribly biased against you when grading?
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I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.
You can get by with poor quality migrant stock if you filter aggressively enough, while the average African migrant might be net negative, restrict yourself to middle class or wealthy Nigerian Igbos and you're going to do a whole lot better, like the US does, and the EU can't.
I grant that they were poorer till the 60s and the end of segregation. However, I think it reflects worse on the ADOS than the US that they keep themselves segregated, or behave so badly that everyone runs away, as is the case with white flight. They certainly complain very hard when white people move back into the neighborhood, calling it gentrification.
Further, ADOS blacks don't exist in isolation, there are plenty of other ethnic groups that were dirt poor when they came to the US at a similar time frame, and yet managed to entrench themselves as productive members of society. Just off the cuff, Vietnamese, Japs and Chinese immigrants coming to the US before the 60s or even shortly afterwards were even worse off than the native AA population.
You inevitably end up with things as stupid as Structural Racism (or racism of the gaps as I prefer to call it) posited as explanations for the same, where a combination of HBD and culture are far more parsimonious. Especially when hundreds of billions in affirmative action have failed to close the gaps.
I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this, since ADOS are the only significant "involuntary immigrants" in the US, and the closest analogy, Native Americans, can't be called immigrants, even if they also do terribly as a group.
Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.
There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory".
The "US is better at assimilating" narrative is consistent with all the examples (the claim I made above was that the ADOS example doesn't contradict it). It also has theoretical justifications---the whole thing about immigrants in the US actually being given a fair chance since the country isn't blind to unfair biases against them, for example. The "populations are different" narrative still needs some sort of justification why Mexican/Central American immigrant populations in the US are actually meaningfully, intrinsically different from MENA immigrant populations in Europe beyond just "I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate".
Even as someone who thinks HBD is almost certainly true and major, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it explains all discrepancies, just most of them. Culture certainly plays a part, and bad attractors end up dragging countries down. Certainly, measures like strict enforcement of the law can make a massive difference, as El Salvador attests.
I don't really have a very strong position on whether the US or France does assimilation better, but the former seems to benefit from both a better quality of applicants and well as a more strict immigration process, though not very much more on the latter. I could be wrong, since I only have passing familiarity on the topic, and mainly regarding skilled immigration, which is far more relevant to my own interests.
Popperian notions of falsifiability are vastly inferior to a more nuanced Bayesian approach where there's no way to literally 100% prove or disprove anything as a fundamental mathematical impossibility unless you initialize an agent with malign priors of 1 or 0, making them immune to further evidence.
When I say "falsify", I use the standard of overwhelming evidence such that only motivated reasoning would argue otherwise, either via outright dishonesty or simply by making an error (perfectly possible when the mainstream only pushes one view and suppresses others). I prefer to be charitable and think of the latter when arguing with most Motte users; unless the issue is that we agree on all the facts but disagree on their implications, which is likely an unresolvable values difference.
Even if sociology is harder to study than the harder sciences, it's still possible to operate outside a state of total epistemic uncertainty.
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I think the Native Americans serve as a great second example. Forcefully immigrated? Not exactly. Forcefully moved and made part of the US? Definitely. The fact they also do poorly is a second data point in favor.
I feel bad for the poor bastards who were minding their business till they ended up a rarity in their own country. I'm sure they think that everyone else who came along later did a pretty terrible job of assimilating ;)
That being said, yes, I agree it supports the idea that HBD can overcome almost any well-meaning intervention that doesn't engage in eugenics to some degree.
On the other hand, there hasn’t been any serious effort to assimilate the African American population since the end of Jim Crow. And their culture is really bad.
I would point to groups that started out with poor cultures and self-domesticated, which would cover a lot of examples.
It certainly is the case that the stench of slavery and segregation provides a strong shield to dismiss any attempts at cultural uplift as being irredeemably racist and paternalistic, with guaranteed claims of the white man's burden.
I think such measures could do something to ameliorate the issue and are worth pursuing, but the evidence from the outcomes of black kids adopted out to white parents suggests that without some kind of eugenic intervention it's unlikely to close the gap. No reason not to try though!
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