Good article, although I think the author would do well to really interrogate the word 'integrate'. It tends to get used to mean different things.
Compare Australian Aborigines to Chinese Australians. The former are mired in poverty and alcoholism, is this a lack of 'integration', even though they've been there since before the Europeans turned up?
Meanwhile, the Chinese arrive, do very well at school, earn lots of money, obey the law etc. They do this to such an extent that their outcomes are better than the Anglo-Australians that preceeded them. Is this integration? Is it even logically possible for an immigrant population to be more integrated than the population they're integrating in to?
As I see it, integration is orthogonal to making good citizens. In the UK, Sikhs are very good citizens by all the usual metrics, but they almost never intermarry because their religion forbids it. Meanwhile, Afro-Caribbeans 'intermarry' with the native underclass and their children remain in that class.
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Notes -
Good article, although I think the author would do well to really interrogate the word 'integrate'. It tends to get used to mean different things.
Compare Australian Aborigines to Chinese Australians. The former are mired in poverty and alcoholism, is this a lack of 'integration', even though they've been there since before the Europeans turned up?
Meanwhile, the Chinese arrive, do very well at school, earn lots of money, obey the law etc. They do this to such an extent that their outcomes are better than the Anglo-Australians that preceeded them. Is this integration? Is it even logically possible for an immigrant population to be more integrated than the population they're integrating in to?
As I see it, integration is orthogonal to making good citizens. In the UK, Sikhs are very good citizens by all the usual metrics, but they almost never intermarry because their religion forbids it. Meanwhile, Afro-Caribbeans 'intermarry' with the native underclass and their children remain in that class.
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