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Comment by sol_remmy2 | Hacker News Reader

Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable.

But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.

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This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.

That is the point isn't it? European countries finally start catching up to the US in the size of their immigrant population, and all of a sudden you're seeing massive social upheaval and populist movements popping up everywhere.

> European countries finally start catching up to the US in the size of their immigrant population,

No. Several European countries have had significant foreign-born populations for a long time.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/549292/foreign-born-popu...

Those stats count an immigrant from any neighboring Western European country as foreign born. That makes them highly misleading compared to the US. In the US, a person from a different state does not count as an immigrant.

Of course not, but a state is not a country. Germany has 16 states, for example, and the statistics don't count people from different states as immigrants.

However, a person from a neighbouring country (e.g. Mexico) would count as an immigrant in the US.

Just because states are massive in the US doesn't make them equivalent to different countries in Europe, which all have their own language, ethnic background, and culture. A German person moving 350 miles to Italy (from Munich to Venice) is definitely an immigrant, with a completely different background, even though the distance itself isn't even enough to go between Austin and Houston in Texas.

I think GP's point is more that there are many more surrounding countries from which immigration is easier, than in the U.S.

There may be more cultural distance between Austin and Houston than you think :-)

Percent foreign born isn’t really a good metric of the level of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity.

It was, I think, correct until relatively recently. Certainly, the countries of Western Europe of the 80s were, for the most part, each very homogeneous.

It's no longer the case (I read today that 1 in 4 Swedish schoolchidren wasn't born in Sweden!), and I wonder very much what that will mean for the future of Europe. The mass influx of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians & Italians in the 19th century radically changed what it meant to be an American, and it seems to me that Europe is about to go through an even larger-scale change.

I think you may only be looking at immigrant based visas in the US. Whereas you need to look at permenant residents (ie green card holders = 13.2M of which 8.9M are eligible for citizenship).

... yeah, I don't think those Syrian refugees are vacationing on the Rhine with OP. He doesn't see them on the bus because they can't even afford the bus he takes...

I have Syrian refugee neighbors, we live almost a stone's throw from the Rhine, they seem fine

==solely middle-class country==

Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?

I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that there is more money to spread around even with a comparatively large immigrant population.

Yes however the demographic diversity in the US makes it less likely for people to want to "spread it" around.

If your entire country is the population of one large US metro and everyone is the same ethnicity and culture, there are fewer cognitive impediments to being empathetic at scale.

Personally, I believe that rich people will find a way to justify being more rich. If not they'll hire some economists from Harvard to come up with some good excuses.

==everyone is the same ethnicity and culture==

I think depends on how you define ethnicity and culture.

Sweden foreign-born population - 17.0% [1]

US foreign-born population - 13.7% [2]

[1] https://nordic.businessinsider.com/swedens-foreign-born-popu...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-data/u-s-...

Using just the census designated measures would be a fine start.

Foreign born population wouldn't begin to address diversity in the US.

In Sweden it might be the case that foreign born population is the only source of ethnic diversity.

Whereas in the US, the people in northern Maine live in a completely different world than the people in Southern Florida.

==Whereas in the US, the people in northern Maine live in a completely different world than the people in Southern Florida.==

And your contention is that Stockholm, Malmo, Kiruna, Haparanda and Skalstugan are all the same?

My contention is that median variability of cultural attributes between those cities is signifcantly less than median variability of cultural attributes in US cities.

That is a fair observation. To clarify, you think that makes it harder to find political solutions because people don't feel they are "in it together"?

Exactly. The easier it is to find differences in your group and another group under the same organization, especially with a weak overarching culture, the less likely those groups will coordinate politically and economically.

US white, non-Hispanic population: 61.3%.... Swedish white, non-Hispanic population: easily 90%+

Ok great. Now segment that further into cultural and lingusitic differences.

The 250,000 "white non-Hispanic" people in Louisiana speaking Creole Patois can't communicate easily with the 200,000 or so "white non-Hispanic" people who speak Appalachian English.

"Race" is a starting point, within which there are so many variances in the US. I've traveled a lot of places, but I've yet to find anywhere in the world as diverse at such a wide scale as that in the US. It's messy, violent, uncertain and magnificent.

And those distinctions existed when the US middle class was far more robust. You still haven’t proven that demographics and not politics is the cause.

==Swedish white, non-Hispanic population: easily 90%+==

Not only is this contention wrong [1], it is completely arbitrary. Ethnicity isn't just how you want to draw lines to prove some point. Sweden has multiple ethnicities within what you call "Swedish white, non-Hispanic". This is observed, most obviously, through different dialects and cultures. Swedes that border Norway are different than Swedes that border Finland.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

And white people in the U.S. are also not homogeneous. So what?

The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries. And that's before you even consider the country as a whole.

==The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries.==

Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000). I haven't seen any evidence presented that proves demographic diversity is the reason for increased inequality.

Meanwhile, we can observe political decisions over the past 40 years which have had an impact on how worker productivity turns into wages. Examples are a lower the top income tax rate, a stagnant minimum wage, the explosion of stock-based compensation, weakening the estate tax, the weakening of unions, high healthcare costs, etc.

> Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000).

Not really. Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970. As of 2010, those two groups combined make up only 75% of the population. There have been radical changes in the demography of the U.S. in the last 50-80 years.

I actually agree with you that changing demographics are not the whole story, but the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.

Source for U.S. demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

==Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970==

The large immigrant communities from Italy, Germany and Ireland were not considered "white" when they first came to the US. Only later did that occur as definitions of race have changed over time, usually to serve a political purpose.

==the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.==

Have you explored the possibility that people's obsession with this is what has actually undermined social cohesion? It has happened before in American history with the Know-Nothing Party.

==Source for U.S. demographics==

Your own source shows "whites" (72.4%) and "blacks" (12.6%) as making up 85% of the population as of 2010. You have decided to further delineate that into "non-hispanic white" which is not an actual race. Also notable that you don't split out the differences of Southern Italians and Northern Irish. Do immigrants from Spain count as white or Hispanic?

Isn't this expected when Sweden has a significantly lower population than the US?

One argument is the left wing split when the white suburban middle class stopped supporting taxing itself to fund the social safety net.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14543938/do...

"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots." -- Richard Rorty [1997]

"Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?"

The USA previously decided three times to explicitly create its middle class. The New Deal, the Homestead Act, etc. Policy choices which were hard fought and narrowly won.

Wealth and Democracy: How Great Fortunes and Government Created America's Aristocracy by Kevin Phillips

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Democracy-Fortunes-Government-...

Without active redistribution, accelerating inequity is inevitable.

That the rich get richer is just math. Not a value statement.

Plan accordingly.

Easily disproven statement by looking at real stats [1], where most western european countries are ahead of the US. If you're suggesting those immigrants are not "poor", consider the Syrian crisis, Germany and Sweden were by far the largest takers of syrian refugees in the west, while the US hardly took any syrians at all. In fact, I read somewhere that Sweden in 2015 was the largest taker of refugees per capita from non-neighboring countries EVER.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Which has led to massive issues within Sweden.

An extraordinary 190,000 refugees are now expected to arrive in Sweden this year - double what the agency expected at the start of the year, and more people than live in Uppsala, the country's fourth largest city.

If the predictions are correct, Sweden will take 20,000 asylum applications per million people in 2015, double the rate even of Germany.

The strain is beginning to show everywhere from politics - where the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are, according to two of the country's eight main polls, now the party with the most support - to finance, where both the central government and municipalities are struggling to find savings to cover the costs.

https://www.dw.com/en/sweden-hits-refugee-crisis-zero-hour/a...

If you look at immigration rates over the past 50 years, the US comes far far ahead.

The US look a majority of its immigrants in the 90s and early 2000s, while Sweden took near-zero immigrants until 10 years ago.

Additionally, many Western European 'immigrants' are actually just people moving between different Western European countries.

You're so far off it's not even funny.

Sorry mate, do your research next time

That link shows that the US took in twice as many immigrants as the entire EU. Per capita doesn't mean much at this scale- the 5 million the US took the year before don't magically become middle class taxpayers just because a year has passed.

I don't know about Sweden/Denmark/Norway but this is not true of the Western European country Germany. I'm an American living in Germany. It's shockingly easy to immigrate to here. It takes 5 years to get permanent residency. The process is humane and reasonable. More than half the people I work with are immigrants from all over the world. No one I've asked even considers moving to America because of the nearly non-existent social safety net, the expense of having children, the unwelcoming rhetoric about immigrants, and universally toxic experiences with American government officials (TSA, customs, etc.). That story about things are better in Europe because Europe is culturally homogeneous is not true in Germany. It's also true that there is new conflict/friction within German society because of the heterogeneity. But the presence of immigrants has not in any way made the country less "nice and comfortable". These qualities are the product of the society's belief that everyone should have a reasonable quality of life. People here make a choice to pay more taxes towards that aim and they do this because they believe in it.

This is completely false.

Neither side really "accepts" poor immigrants, the availability of unskilled work visas is extremely limited.

Wow, almost every sentence in your post is at least partially wrong.

Per capita basis, I believe EU countries take on more immigrants than America

I thought that was interesting, so I just checked - the EU as a whole has about 52.5 million people living in countries they were not born in (including other EU countries) and a total population of about 512 million. So that's about 10%. The US has about 44.5 million foreign born in it, with a total population of about 328 million. So that's about 13.5%.

So no, the EU does not have more immigrants than the US per capita. If you remove European citizens moving to other European countries, they don't have as many immigrants by sheer number, either.

There is also a sliding scale in EU. Western European countries like Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, take in far more immigrants than Poland, Hungary etc. The point that triggered this whole thread was immigration is the reason America doesn't have the same quality of life as EU. Which is clearly not true, considering Germany and NL takes in very high % of immigrants. Even with your 13 vs 10% is negligible for any meaningful policy differences. US is different not because of immigration, but due to its political bent.

It's possible that the US is different because of the length of time that immigrants have been a part of policy, though.

It's funny that the US is compared to the EU; the US is more similar to and should probably be compared to Canada, India and Australia

I'm having trouble finding a more recent source, but as of 2012 that wasn't close to true. It's actually a larger gap than I expected. I'm going to keep researching to see if I can find more recent numbers. Do you happen to have a more recent source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

__EU__

Total net migration: 2,324,066

Net migration per 1000 inhabitants: 4.60

__US__

Total net migration: 5,007,887

Net migration per 1000 inhabitants: 15.94

> Western European countries hardly take immigrants

I almost died reading this blatant lie.

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