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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.

They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.

There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.

This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.

Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.

Can you be more specific about what exact differences you see between East Africans in San Diego and the general population? The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. I'm also not going to count examples where East Africans do better than the general population since these would be examples of successful assimilation.

What are the non-superficial/non-appearance-based points where East Africans immigrants in San Diego are significantly worse than the general population?

The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences.

So, I actually strongly disagree with this, because dress is the easiest way to signal to locals that you are eager to assimilate. It’s incredibly difficult to learn a new language as an adult, to change one’s moral assumptions and values, to pick up all the various folkways and pop-culture knowledge which distinguish locals from outsiders; it is not difficult at all to go to Goodwill or Salvation Army and purchase a $2 t-shirt and some secondhand jeans. If I were to emigrate to, say, Iran, the very first thing I would do is buy a couple of outfits to wear in public that would signal “I know I’m a guest in your country, and I’m making a basic effort to indicate that I respect your local customs and am trying to fit in.”

The fact that these East Africans immigrants do not adopt local modes of dress and comportment is not due to a simple oversight or laziness on their part; their women dress the way they do because of specific strong religious and cultural injunctions to do so. So, right off the bat, they wear their reluctance to assimilate right out on their bodies for everyone to see.

And it’s not like the foreign mode of dress is a false indicator, and if you talked to these women you’d find they’re just like us. They are far, far more devoutly religious than basically any native resident of this city, and their religion very obviously influences their behavior and their relationship to their families, their husbands, and strangers. These women are very quiet and submissive, at least to men, and often have large families of children, aged closely together.

And to be clear, I’m not even saying these are bad behaviors! I’m no feminist, and I wish that white American women would temper their outlook to become more like these woman in certain select ways. I think that conservative dress and a quiet demeanor around men are usually net-positive qualities, although I don’t think they should be enforced via domestic abuse, which as I understand is pervasive in the particular communities in question. But these all mark these people as very distinctly different, in ways that can’t be read as anything other than defiance, since they can easily look around then and see that the vast majority of people here dress a certain way, and it would be trivially easy to imitate that if one wanted to.

As to their children, they too - especially the daughters - tend also to be very religious; the first person I ever knew who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance was a classmate of mine in first grade, a child of Muslim East African refugees, who had a religious objection. (Again, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance is based - I don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance nowadays - but it’s certainly a strong indicator of not wanting to assimilate.) The boys seem less so, and my experiences with East African guys has been almost uniformly (though not entirely) negative. The first kid who bullied me in middle school was of East African descent, as was the first one who actually physically hit me for the first time in my life. Later on, the guy who robbed me in public was also a second-generation East African from the nearby East African neighborhood.

So, again, if your claim is that immigrants to the US are overwhelmingly eager to assimilate to local norms of behavior, then I think this particular community is a notable example of one who very visibly defies that assumption. We can argue about whether the ways in which they deviate from local norms are positive or negative, but the important thing is that they’re real and obvious.

Ok, I think we have two different standards for what assimilation means. To me, assimilation is just adapting well enough to the host country that you provide more benefits than harms. If I'm not mistaken, you seem to require something more: a level of conformity to the culture that's already there in as many ways as possible---dress, food, religion, etc.

Benefiting more than harming of course does not mean completely ignoring whatever the native culture is at the time. There's a good example brought up on SSC here.

(one more hypothetical, to clarify what I’m talking about – imagine a culture where the color of someone’s clothes tells you a lot of things about them – for example, anyone wearing red is a prostitute. This may work well as long as everyone follows the culture. If you mix it 50-50 with another culture that doesn’t have this norm, then things go downhill quickly; you proposition a lady wearing red, only to get pepper sprayed in the eye. Eventually the first culture gives up and stops trying to communicate messages through clothing color.)

I do count immigration breaking a norm like this as causing harm. Similarly, I would usually only count immigrants who learn English as fully assimilated.

Why do I think my standard for assimilation is better? The short answer is first that western countries, in particular and even more so the US, haven't had a homogenous culture to conform to for a very long time. Talking again about clothing, people aggressively refusing to conform through fashion is one of the most central things in American society---like how much do you remember from high school? Why does it matter whether they stand out by wearing all black and spiking their hair or by wearing traditional East African clothing?

I really think the article linked above is the right way to think about it---"western" culture is just a bunch of the most compelling parts of all cultures in the world mashed together into one plus some overarching "Noahide laws" to optimize it for assimilating others. I would in addition claim that this culture is superior to all others because it's the best we have for promoting technological and scientific development. Therefore it's good that this is what dominates the country and we shouldn't return to whatever there was before.

More specifically, extreme tolerance for non-conformity and diversity is one of the most important part of the Noahide laws that make it work. You need a broad spectrum of weird and unexpected, and possibly even threatening ideas for there to be innovative breakthroughs---simply put, innovation can't occur unless there are enough people that are actually thinking differently. I don't think it's a coincidence that Silicon Valley grew out of the most non-conformist part of the US. Any requirement that immigrants assimilate by conforming breaks this important part of the greatness of western culture.

At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that

I for one look forward to it, since it's an argument a lot of anti-HBDers make that I haven't seen a good answer to.

If you want to read about turn-of-the century Italian homicide rates, Jeffrey Adler's First In Violence, Deepest in Dirt talks about the Italian community in Chicago which had murder rates upwards of 40/100k in the 1910s. This was a pattern that extended to other cities. IIRC it was Philadelphia where one-third of prisoners were of recent Italian background in the 1910s or 20s but I can't remember where I read that at the moment. Notably southern Italy where the great majority of Italian-Americans came from also had a very high homicide rate in the 19th - early 20th centuries, and when you remember that crime data in 1850s Italy was probably less than complete, it was likely even higher. Southern Italy of course no longer has homicide rates like this. They're still higher than in the north but it's like 0.7 vs 0.5 or something like that.

When I have tried to engage with the 'HBD' controversy in the past I always run against a wall of statistical and mathematical arguments that I don't think I'm smart enough to evaluate, but this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.

Coleman Hughes is a big advocate for the idea that African-American culture (as distinct from African-American DNA) is deficient in ways which makes young African-American men prone to criminality, and IIRC he's repeatedly drawn the parallel with mid-twentieth century Italian-Americans.

To be fair, that hypothesis isn’t incompatible with HBD. African American homicide rates are shockingly high by stable first world country standards and there can be multiple ingredients in that recipe.

Absolutely.

No. I found Handwaving Freakoutery's (also known as /u/beej67) analysis very persuasive. TL;DR: the US's high murder rate can't be caused by guns alone, as murder rates by county don't track guns per capita by county and black Americans commit far more murders than white Americans despite owning far fewer guns. It can't be just HBD, because black Americans commit murders at almost double the rate of sub-Saharan African countries. Rather, the true underlying factor is "rate of single motherhood". Reintegrate the black American family unit at scale, and the murder rate will plummet accordingly.

I was talking about this exact topic with my girlfriend the other day, and she was curious as to how it came to pass that black Americans have such a high rate of single motherhood compared to other ethnic groups. I admit I don't have a great answer to this, but I find the "slavery separated mothers from their children" explanations unconvincing and ahistorical, given that high rates of black single motherhood only appear to date back to the sexual revolution and were similar to white rates prior were vastly lower in the 1970s than today (29.5% of black children in 1970 vs. 45.6% in 2022) despite the 1970s being fifty years closer chronologically to slavery than 2022.

this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.

Another argument is often the difference between Mexicans living in border towns between the US and Mexico. The same people, culture and genetics yet murder rates are often vastly different.

Sure, I'll grant you that this seems to be evidence against HBD. However, I think it's still a highly effective theory, and certainly more parsimonious than bullshit like systemic racism and the like. The evidence, at least IMO, seems to be pretty net positive overall.

Maybe there's something interesting going on here, like the lead ban and decreased criminality in all demographics but didn't close the black-white gap. I'm waiting for that effort post myself!

Something I’ve never seen accounted for in discourse about the decline in criminality is the shift towards firearms using smaller bullets being the default available in America- when criminals used magnum revolvers and sawn-off shotguns their victims were less likely to survive than they were from a 9 mm round.

Not sure the difference is that significant for handguns even if it's only a single round -- and one should probably take into account that popular nines tend to hold ~3x as many rounds as a magnum revolver. (which would probably be on the expensive side for a fifties criminal anyways? The stereotypical crime gun from the era for me is a "Saturday Night Special" in .38, max)

Shotguns are probably still used quite a bit in crime? And if one were to replace a sawed-off shotgun with something with more gangster cred, that thing would probably be a MAC-10 or something, so I wouldn't really say it's necessarily less destructive.

Criminals use larger bullets nowadays- most gunshot wounds pre 1990s were from small caliber pistols like a .25ACP or .22. Very few crimes were committed with a .45, which is very common today.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/GUIC.PDF

Relative to shootings involving small-caliber firearms (reference category), the odds of death if the gun was large caliber were 4.5 times higher (OR, 4.54; 95% CI, 2.37-8.70; P < .001) and, if medium caliber, 2.3 times higher (OR, 2.25; 95% CI, 1.37-3.70; P = .001)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2688536#

That's a fair point, but I don't know if historical records are that granular, but if anyone wants to dig into it I'll be looking on.

I don’t see it. One, there was an exogenous shock in the reduction in lead exposure. Second, isn’t the problem somewhat self correcting in that the really violent often end up dying young and thereby decreasing the odds of passing on kids

I would assume that the kind of violent people with low inhibition and self control would be more likely to reproduce due to a propensity for unprotected sex.

Of course, that's the case today, but perhaps fertility rates were high enough back then that it wasn't significant.

And we have a very different idea of what really violent looks like now compared to back then, just to add another confounder to the mix.

Do we?

Did you mean to respond to my comment?

Latino crime rates have converged with white. This is old data and I know they updated it the past few years to show even a smaller gap.

https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Latino+crime+rates

There might even be less age adjusted crime today in Hispanic populations than white.

I have a lot of concerns with crime but Hispanic crime doesn’t seem to be a real issue in America (education gaps are).

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