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> You’re in danger of becoming India. What does this even mean? > replace a huge chunk of your population Is that what's happening? I thought we were adding,

by squigz 3y ago

> You’re in danger of becoming India. What does this even mean? > replace a huge chunk of your population Is that what's happening? I thought we were adding, not replacing.

rayiner 3y ago
Look at it this way. Would you like it if, through “addition” and natural attrition, 20% of your company was ex-McKinsey folks? Countries are the same as companies. The way they are reflects the culture and values of the people. When a large fraction of your population becomes recent immigrants from the subcontinent, your country will become more like the subcontinent. I’m part of the problem here. Half my family lives in Canada now. They’re super nice people and their food is a huge upgrade over the dreck Canadians were eating. But they’re Bangladeshi, not Canadian, in substance if not in legal technicalities. They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > your country will become more like the subcontinent You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves. To be sure, immigrant enclaves such as the Haredim in NYC or the heavily-Muslim banlieues in France can do that. But it's generally on a very-local basis. And on a national, long-term basis: Successive generations are born to immigrant families. They marry — often to spouses from other ancestral cultures — and have their own kids. Those kids are influenced in countless ways by their teachers; their friends and other peers; the media; and other facets of mainstream culture. That's how assimilation happens: The host culture absorbs immigrants — and influences them — while borrowing from their cultures, adding new ingredients to the "alloy" (or amalgam? I'm avoiding the Melting Pot metaphor). Or at least that's what happens when the host culture doesn't engage in knee-jerk exclusionary behavior out of pathological fear of The Other and an egotistical assumption that We Know Best About All Things For All Time. (Source: As I said in another thread recently, in various ancestral lines I'm descended from immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents, with ancestry in four different countries (possibly five; we're not sure). My kids have two more countries in their own ancestries from my wife's side, and their respective spouses have even more countries in the mix, so any kids they have will be even more of a blend.)
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves. I would say that, as a first generation immigrant, I'm viewing cultural change through a vantage point that most Americans lack. Most Americans have only arm's-length contact with immigrants; they aren't in a position to understand how their culture and values shape their behavior, including their political and civic behavior. I don't deny that the immigrants are also changed in the process--I simply reject the assumption that the resulting amalgam is better. If you're Google, a two-way cultural exchange with a bunch of former IBM people isn't going to make your organization better. And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tjgyWQ8nU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tjgyWQ8nU. It would probably be even more orderly and well-run if it was still New Amsterdam and run by Dutch people.
    - dctoedt 3y ago
      > And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for But then we have to wonder as well whether NYC and its surrounding environs would have evolved into the global capital of finance, culture, technology, etc., that it is. We'll never know, for example, whether Bell Labs would have arisen in a region populated "mainly [by] people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for[.]" And more generally: We'd have to wonder whether the U.S. would have, for example, twice led the rescue of Europe from German fascism and provided nearly 80 years of relative peace that has been labeled Pax Americana — or would an isolationist U.S. instead have led to even more domination of various countries by aggressors (see: Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin); warlords and their gangs (see: Somalia, Haiti, etc.); and xenophobic nationalists (see: Orbán, Modi, and their ilk). Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather. Immigration is gonna happen; trying to stop it, using our available means, would cost more financially — and perhaps morally, for some crimes-against-humanity measures that can be imagined — than decent societies are willing to pay.
- squigz 3y ago
  > They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy. I'd be curious to hear what you think is missing from the culture of Indians/Bangladeshis/Pakistanis that would preclude them from becoming part of an "egalitarian western democracy"?
  - rayiner 3y ago
    You're asking the wrong question. Individual Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis can easily "become part of" a western democracy. The real question is how these immigrants can maintain and perpetuate an egalitarian western democracy. At the scale of immigration Canada and the US is experiencing, you can’t take for granted that the immigrants will simply maintain the kind of society that’s currently in place. Democracy doesn't arise from putting certain rules and constitutional structures down on paper. Instead, it’s the expression of the civic culture of a people. That culture, in turn, isn’t about superficial stuff like food and language. Who wouldn’t think Indian food is a good thing? But what’s important to maintaining and perpetuating a democracy is deep culture. How do people in a culture view relations between people in society? On the sub-continent, we have an intensely hierarchical view of society, where we place great importance on people’s breeding (coming from a “good family”). Family ties and personal relationships, moreover, are much more important than abstract rules. People are much more willing to cover things up or bend rules to protect personal relationships than in the west, making the sub-continent a breeding ground for corruption. Asians, in general, come from societies that had millennia of large-scale imperial government. So the view of the relationship between the government and the individual is very different. I'll give you a concrete example of the distinction. My family easily assimilated into the Virginia town where I grew up. That only means we can function—very successfully—within an environment where the norms are imposed by some other culture. We couldn’t recreate that environment. My mom can function in a society where norms of egalitarianism are imposed by a dominant culture. But that’s just not how she sees the world. She looks down on "the common people" and think that society should be governed top-down by people of good breeding and education. Because that’s a foundational assumption in our culture. And if suddenly 20% of the population were like my mom, the environment would become less egalitarian. In fact, that's exactly what happened to my town. We went from being a quintessentially American middle class town to having a large number of affluent, educated Asians move in. And they completely changed the environment.

by squigz 3y ago

> You’re in danger of becoming India. What does this even mean? > replace a huge chunk of your population Is that what's happening? I thought we were adding, not replacing.

rayiner 3y ago

Look at it this way. Would you like it if, through “addition” and natural attrition, 20% of your company was ex-McKinsey folks? Countries are the same as companies. The way they are reflects the culture and values of the people. When a large fraction of your population becomes recent immigrants from the subcontinent, your country will become more like the subcontinent. I’m part of the problem here. Half my family lives in Canada now. They’re super nice people and their food is a huge upgrade over the dreck Canadians were eating. But they’re Bangladeshi, not Canadian, in substance if not in legal technicalities. They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy.

dctoedt 3y ago
> your country will become more like the subcontinent You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves. To be sure, immigrant enclaves such as the Haredim in NYC or the heavily-Muslim banlieues in France can do that. But it's generally on a very-local basis. And on a national, long-term basis: Successive generations are born to immigrant families. They marry — often to spouses from other ancestral cultures — and have their own kids. Those kids are influenced in countless ways by their teachers; their friends and other peers; the media; and other facets of mainstream culture. That's how assimilation happens: The host culture absorbs immigrants — and influences them — while borrowing from their cultures, adding new ingredients to the "alloy" (or amalgam? I'm avoiding the Melting Pot metaphor). Or at least that's what happens when the host culture doesn't engage in knee-jerk exclusionary behavior out of pathological fear of The Other and an egotistical assumption that We Know Best About All Things For All Time. (Source: As I said in another thread recently, in various ancestral lines I'm descended from immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents, with ancestry in four different countries (possibly five; we're not sure). My kids have two more countries in their own ancestries from my wife's side, and their respective spouses have even more countries in the mix, so any kids they have will be even more of a blend.)
- rayiner 3y ago
  > You really do seem to view life through a very-narrow lens; you appear to be generalizing your own family's recent, one-generation experience as though immigrant culture somehow quickly alters the host culture in major ways without that happening to the immigrants themselves. I would say that, as a first generation immigrant, I'm viewing cultural change through a vantage point that most Americans lack. Most Americans have only arm's-length contact with immigrants; they aren't in a position to understand how their culture and values shape their behavior, including their political and civic behavior. I don't deny that the immigrants are also changed in the process--I simply reject the assumption that the resulting amalgam is better. If you're Google, a two-way cultural exchange with a bunch of former IBM people isn't going to make your organization better. And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tjgyWQ8nU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tjgyWQ8nU. It would probably be even more orderly and well-run if it was still New Amsterdam and run by Dutch people.
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    > And I also don't agree that the change we have had in America from prior generations of immigrants is a good thing. New York City, for example, would probably be much better run and more orderly if it was still mainly people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for But then we have to wonder as well whether NYC and its surrounding environs would have evolved into the global capital of finance, culture, technology, etc., that it is. We'll never know, for example, whether Bell Labs would have arisen in a region populated "mainly [by] people from a culture that reflexively queue up even if they're unsure what they're standing in line for[.]" And more generally: We'd have to wonder whether the U.S. would have, for example, twice led the rescue of Europe from German fascism and provided nearly 80 years of relative peace that has been labeled Pax Americana — or would an isolationist U.S. instead have led to even more domination of various countries by aggressors (see: Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin); warlords and their gangs (see: Somalia, Haiti, etc.); and xenophobic nationalists (see: Orbán, Modi, and their ilk). Bemoaning immigration is not unlike bemoaning bad weather. Immigration is gonna happen; trying to stop it, using our available means, would cost more financially — and perhaps morally, for some crimes-against-humanity measures that can be imagined — than decent societies are willing to pay.
squigz 3y ago
> They don’t have the culture and values suitable for running an egalitarian western democracy. I'd be curious to hear what you think is missing from the culture of Indians/Bangladeshis/Pakistanis that would preclude them from becoming part of an "egalitarian western democracy"?
- rayiner 3y ago
  You're asking the wrong question. Individual Indians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis can easily "become part of" a western democracy. The real question is how these immigrants can maintain and perpetuate an egalitarian western democracy. At the scale of immigration Canada and the US is experiencing, you can’t take for granted that the immigrants will simply maintain the kind of society that’s currently in place. Democracy doesn't arise from putting certain rules and constitutional structures down on paper. Instead, it’s the expression of the civic culture of a people. That culture, in turn, isn’t about superficial stuff like food and language. Who wouldn’t think Indian food is a good thing? But what’s important to maintaining and perpetuating a democracy is deep culture. How do people in a culture view relations between people in society? On the sub-continent, we have an intensely hierarchical view of society, where we place great importance on people’s breeding (coming from a “good family”). Family ties and personal relationships, moreover, are much more important than abstract rules. People are much more willing to cover things up or bend rules to protect personal relationships than in the west, making the sub-continent a breeding ground for corruption. Asians, in general, come from societies that had millennia of large-scale imperial government. So the view of the relationship between the government and the individual is very different. I'll give you a concrete example of the distinction. My family easily assimilated into the Virginia town where I grew up. That only means we can function—very successfully—within an environment where the norms are imposed by some other culture. We couldn’t recreate that environment. My mom can function in a society where norms of egalitarianism are imposed by a dominant culture. But that’s just not how she sees the world. She looks down on "the common people" and think that society should be governed top-down by people of good breeding and education. Because that’s a foundational assumption in our culture. And if suddenly 20% of the population were like my mom, the environment would become less egalitarian. In fact, that's exactly what happened to my town. We went from being a quintessentially American middle class town to having a large number of affluent, educated Asians move in. And they completely changed the environment.