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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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