Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home | Hacker News Reader

Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

axios.com

121 pointsmooreds177 comments

I grew up in one of these households. My grandmother didn’t speak English so my dad mandated Hindi be spoken in the household.

I think it was a net positive in my life. I pick up phrases and sounds from new languages pretty easily. I didn’t do great in my English classes in HS but am a pretty good writer now.

From an assimilation pov, I think it’s pretty important to grow up speaking whatever language you do alongside English. I don’t have the data but I know ESL kids have a hard time in early schooling here in California.

I’m one of these households. My wife has spoken speaks Norwegian almost exclusively at home with the kids for 12 years.

Our kids are taking Spanish in junior high, so now we have switched over to Spanish a few nights a week. Neither of us are native in Spanish but can read, listen, and speak at a high level.

Honestly, it is hard with teenagers, but once you break through it is fun. We are all learning together. And we have tacos or tapas on Spanish night (Tuesdays and/or Thursdays)

Can those californians now actually show some care towards support for multiple languages in the software they write and encode some basics like support for users to move between places, countries and regions? :P

It's kind of incredible how absolutely terrible most SV products are at supporting other locales and how horrible experience with products is if you dare to do something silly like move to another place. God forbid support for multiple languages from multiple people.

I agree that there is a lot of room for improvement.

However, proper internationalization is extremely hard and costly. There are soo many languages on the planet and lot of them are quite quirky, my native language is one of them. For example proper pluralization is hell because the declension has multiple forms depending on the amount and noun paradigm. ICU format helps a lot but doesn't solve everything. It's good that browsers are at least getting native support for localization of numbers and datetimes.

Right-to-left can make you sweat a lot. Then you have different sentence orders, vastly variable length of words, rules about where it's ok to break line. Then you have non-linguistic aspects like cultural context. Some icons can have different meaning, some images might be offensive.

The truth is that if you are a startup, doing all of this is a waste of precious time. You have access to 300m customers just in USA alone and the worldwide middle class with money to spend can usually work with English. Internationalization becomes worthy if you get big and want to penetrate more exotic markets or you want to sell to foreign governments which mandate it.

On the other hand even giants like Google can botch it pretty often.

You seem to be operating under some assumptions that Californians are well represented in SV tech companies. I am frequently the only Californian on my team and often the only American in my meetings. Internationalization is just a lot of work. The extent to which it exists is largely due to American style multiculturalism.

The only companies where you’ll see more than one American in a meeting is in startups. They don’t have the bandwidth for internationalization when they can’t even get a domestic audience.

People outside of SV don’t get how few Americans are actually working in SV tech.

I think a lot of this has to do with the tech stacks used to build the software.

Some platforms make internationalization relatively simple with a lot of it happening automatically (as with UIKit on iOS), whereas bring-your-own-everything platforms require someone to think to pull in the appropriate libraries and integrate them properly to have any at all.

I’d be curious to know what percentage of people in California speak no English at all.

I don't know but my wife used to play mahjong in SF Chinatown and almost no one spoke English, including some people who had been in the US for over 30 years. It was a bit surprising.

The next town over from me have a large Vietnamese community, the older generation frequently only speak Vietnamese, relying on their children and grandchildren to help them navigate in society, doctors appointments, interacting with the government and all those things. I'm continuously surprised that someone would refuse to learn the language of a country they lived in for almost 50 years... Like WHY?

Seems rather rude in some sense.

> Like WHY?

Did you grow up with formal education? Did you grow up in a place where girls were encouraged to learn? If either of these is true, your starting condition is miles ahead of the starting conditions for many, many immigrants who came to the US.

It sounds simple, but in order to learn something, you have to first believe you “can.” Can in the sense that you have the ability and that you’re permitted to.

My PhD is in second language acquisition. For my thesis I interviewed, through translators, 276 “non proficient speakers” of the dominant community language. The most common attitudes I encountered were:

(1) I’m too old to learn a new language. It’s just not possible.

(2) I don’t have the right to speak the dominant language because I’m not the same ethnicity / religion / other attribute.

(3) If I speak another language, I will lose who I am to the dominant culture, and be unable to communicate with people “back home.” This last attitude was expressed often, even when the person had no living relatives or friends anywhere else.

These 3 reasons ring closely, its what i see in my own family. They are Cuban and came here older and have never bothered to learn the language mostly out of fear of being too old or loosing their culture. They also have their own micro country were they can get Spanish speaking doctors, jobs and community to socialize. They can go months without hearing a word in English. Confidence is big to learn a language, my own kids are 5 and 6 and they can write / read and speak Spanish and English and speak in french but my son is less extroverted and fallsback more to English on front of people.

Those are some seemingly crazy reasons. I live around a lot of Guatemalans, none of them speak English. (I'm in the US.)I've been wondering why not just learn even a little? But also why go to another country and make no attempt to be part of it.

It is the opposite of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

Which is to say, don't hesitate to attend the next scheduled public execution or gladiatorial combat exhibition.

> If I speak another language, I will lose who I am to the dominant culture

I find this reason very compelling.

Personally I see it as a huge positive to be able to communicate with people and to enjoy cultural benefits - but what about the harms? What about the negative or undesired cultural values that you might absorb and adopt? And what about losing or forgetting your original culture, values and sense of self, and becoming someone you no longer recognize?

It looks like you are a new user. Would be very fascinated to read about your research.

It's amazing that this is being studied, but it's some rather weird reasons. You have people who migrated to the US in the 1950 - 1980 from Europe, they didn't care about losing their ability to speak their native language. It's alway interesting to hear a Dane that moved to the US 50 - 70 years ago. Their language is frozen in time but still fairly good.

Both sets of my grandparents came to the US (New York) from Italy in the 1920's. They learned very broken English, and discouraged my young parents from speaking Italian. All four grandparents felt this way. My parents aren't sure of the reasons, they were just told not to speak Italian outside the house.

Your grandparents were trying to protect your parents from the racism they encountered as immigrants in the 1920s. It was vicious, inexcusable, and largely forgotten due to the success of Italian assimilation in the US.

Jacobson’s “Whiteness of a Different Color” goes into this in detail.

/smacks forehead/

Of course! Thanks for the book recommendation.

It's unexpected, until you dig down into the reasons why immigrants might not learn a new language.

1. There may be a community of your type of immigrants so you might not need English and within the community there are trusted people who can translate, so you don't actually NEED to learn the language yourself. This is why immersion language programs work well since you're forced to learn a language. Otherwise it's much harder, even if you're motivated.

2. When they moved they likely were not given the tools to help them learn. And even if they were given some of these tools, were the immigrants able to balance work with these classes. California does this well, they have a lot of free ESL classes, which are well taught and agencies/non-profits push immigrants to attend them.

3. Learning a new language is HARD, especially when you're older. Especially if it's not similar to your existing language (learning Spanish, French, German is relatively easy for English speakers since there are many words that sound the same. Learning Russian or Mandarin or Arabic is much harder since the language aren't part of the same family).

Integrating large groups into an existing community requires a lot of intentional work, no matter if that's immigrants integrating into a country or a company meeting with another. If that intentional work isn't done, you end up with silos.

I'm Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese people you mentioned who escaped to the US decades ago were refugees. They were escaping a country where bombs were being dropped daily, famines were normal, and literally millions had died due to lack of food.

The literacy rate was 3%. In other words, the majority of those poor folks are not even fluent in writing their main language. Many of them, including my relatives, expressed the wish to learn English, but as you can imagine, it's pretty challenging. Some picked up enough to communicate, some gave up and depended on their children/grandchildren for translation. They had seen war and hell; being alive is a blessing.

This comment is interesting. What little I read about the "boat people" escaping Vietnam in the late 1970s was about comparatively privileged South Vietnamese fleeing the new regime that was out for revenge. So, I would have assumed high literacy from those demographics.

The privileged people in Saigon fleeing the new regime escaped mostly via connection. For example, I know people here who fled on US airplanes/ships. They were educated, and most likely knew some French/English before coming here.

The "boat people" were more likely from the coastal town (like Vung Tau), who dropped everything and got on tiny boats, packed like sardines, hoped to get rescued from other fishing boats when getting out far enough to the ocean. They are often poor folks with nothing to lose, and willing to accept a coin flip chance between death and escaping to the US. For this part, I don't have the concrete statistics. But from the stories I have heard, the survival rate of those boat escapes is worse than 50%.

I know folks like this. Cantonese and Vietnamese. Most of them are (were, back when they were trying to speak English) deeply embarrassed by their accents and utterly captured by that fear.

I can respect that, not least because it's also why I don't use my Spanish.

Learning one language is hard. Only 46% of American native English speakers have above a 6th grade reading level. 20% are functionally illiterate.

https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...

I’d have to imagine a good portion of that is most likely from immigration though.

Even if you’re a native English speaker if your parents are 1st generation Americans there’s still an effect on educational attainment especially depending on the cultural background. It’s a chicken or egg situation. Whenever aggregates are brought up about the US educational system it’s questionable. This country is so large and diverse. I believe if you cut out the Deep South and poor inner city communities our educational rankings shoot back up to the top. There’s a reason the best universities in the world are still in America. It’s not like public education is neglected until college age we just have certain parts of the country that drastically underperform and it’s lot easier to have those parts when it isn’t a small homogeneous community.

Most of Europe speaks at least two, and most of Switzerland 3. I think this might be an effect of the American education system.

Learning language is not that impressive as a cognitive/educational feat. It is mostly a simple matter of practice. School reform is not going to change this. Case in point, Canada where schools are good and French is mandatory struggles to actually teach anyone how to speak French. For Europeans the standard second language is English which is pretty straightforward as a result of globalization. Adding a third language that is spoke by everyone an hour train ride away is not that much extra.

Europe and United States have nearly equal land area of just shy of 4 million square miles. There are 24 official languages of the European Union and English as the lone, defacto language of the USA.

Why would anything else be expected from the American education system when, for example, you can travel the entirety of the US and most of Canada and not have to worry about finding someone who speaks English. The education system in the US is trash for a few reasons, but only teaching English to all is not one of them, and I say this as someone who lives in the US and speaks a few languages.

Reading is a separate skill from speaking. I’m certain those illiterate people have no problem communicating verbally.

> Seems rather rude in some sense.

If I were busting my ass at a job just to make sure I could pay rent and keep food on the table for my kids, I probably wouldn't have much energy left to learn Vietnamese, either.

How many languages have you become fluent in as an adult?

Not just rude, but self-defeating. You lose access to a lot of jobs and consumer opportunities by not speaking the local language.

have you tried to learn Vietnamese !? it is really different.. also, someone told me that in South East Asia, like many places, there is a lot of difference between educated people there and uneducated people there.. an illiterate in their own language, has to learn English or else be "rude" ?

> someone told me that in South East Asia, like many places, there is a lot of difference between educated people there and uneducated people there

Such as their education level? Is that specific to South East Asia somehow?

The vast majority of Vietnamese American came to the US not really as immigrants seeking newfound opportunities, but as refugees who have lost their home. I imagine such a sudden uprooting has made them somewhat insular, as they bound together in a foreign environment for which they were not prepared.

That is true for the older generation (immigrating to US pre 1990-ish). The newer generation immigrating to US has a very different mindset now, and they embrace American values as much as the native born here.

yeah - I am not sure why I get the downvote and suspicious reply, since I explicitly said "like many other places"

yes East San Jose is a hotspot for displaced Vietnamese, who took the American side in the extended, ugly and deeply damaging conflict there. A war that almost all of the people in this area of California vigorously and without fail, opposed.

> have you tried to learn Vietnamese

No, but I also haven't moved to Vietnam permanently. I can't imagine navigating another country with a low English or Danish proficiency and not wanting to learn the local language, if I planed to stay there permanently. It seems like you would be making life extremely difficult for no good reason.

If I lived in another country for 50 years I would absolutely learn the local vernacular.

In fact, I’ve done so with much fewer than 50 years under my belt.

How many American expats in other countries bother to learn the local language?

> large Vietnamese community

Because they don’t need to, they’re large and it doesn’t culturally offer them anything. The kids and outside community wanting their business bend to their needs.

My grandparents hood had FOB Hungarian, Pole, Slovak, Ukranian, Russian, Latvian and probably half a dozen others. They didn’t need English to exist and we’re probably richer they didn’t pine to mimic WASP orthodoxy.

I knew families like this growing up. To me it’s less about how long they have been here vs if they are first or second+ generation immigrants. It has always seemed like the second generation onward picks up English.

* I’m obviously a small sample size dealing with a single immigrant population in one state, but that’s my experience.

This doesn't answer your question, but answers a superset of it...

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/pe...

There is a town in Florida where nobody speaks English.

Hialeah, FL

We're one of these households (Greek + Latvian at home). We love California :)

From an outsider's perspective born and raised in Europe this seems pretty cool but I cant imagine how can I immigrate to the US.

For lingual reasons or other reasons?

Mostly practical. The math coupled with visa requirements just does not add up.

I believe this article misses out on the impact of the development of the children from those households.

It becomes an issue where the groups are large enough that you get kids in school who do not speak English amongst themselves, and thus hamper their development compared to their English speaking peers.

I grew up in a non-English suburb and household - we had it as a mandatory subject in school but my conversational skills was zero and my accent was terrible to boot.

It helped that I read a lot of English books so that helped when I attended an English only university and speaking for the first time when I turned 18.

There was TV but most programs were dubbed - think The Cosby Show, Dallas and Archie Bunker, The Bob Newhart Show, Happy Days was the only English ones we watched.

The Waltons was dubbed though.

Boy was that difficult in the first year - surrounded by English only speakers from a different culture to boot , so I kept a lot to myself and did not engage with anybody.

One of the things that makes America (and the American economy) so great and so large is the fact that the type of economic participants changes rapidly. When the types of participants change, the types of businesses change, leading to continuous change and innovation.

As an example, my state was majority Italians (including many bilingual families). Since the 2000, the demographics have been moving towards Spanish (of the latin American kind) and Portuguese (of the Portugal kind). This shows in the types of new restaurants, businesses and activities popping up.

I don't see what's inherently good about the second paragraph. Nor is it inherently bad, I just don't see why cultural shifts once per generation is necessarily good and itself.

That is way more Filipinos than I would have expected.

largest diaspora outside of the Philippines

A lot of great food diversity follows as grocers cater to the demographic.

Strange wording, why don't they just write... "Almost half of Californians don't speak English at home"?

Because they might speak English and another language?

Probably because speaking a language other than English at home doesn’t mean that they don’t speak English at home.

The article doesn't hint at that at all so I don't think that is the reason.

What do you mean it "doesn't hint at that"? You're discussing the words that convey exactly that information? It's verbatim from the first paragraph in the article.

> Nearly half of all Californians speak a language other than English at home, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows.

Indeed they speak a language other than English at home, so not English. But people reply to my comment claiming this means that they also speak English at home. Where do people read that?

Edit: It's a bit ironic I get downvoted for mentioning the strange wording, but clearly we don't agree on what it's supposed to mean.

People speak more than one language at home.

"speak a non-English language at home" = speak non-English language and maybe English "don't speak English at home" = speak non-English language and never English

It sounds like they didn't study English-speaking at home, just what other languages are spoken.

Ok I understand your confusion. It isn't explicitly stated, it's just implied. "Speak a non-English language at home" implies some families still speaking English at home as well because that's the most general case that is logically consistent. Otherwise you would say "Do not speak English at home" to narrow it down.

The article also doesn't specify the opposite ... why do you think that is not the reason?

Given that the US doest not have an official language, this rings a weird bell. Had the been England or any other country with an official language, it would have been something.

In particular with the history of California and the proximity to Mexico, the opposite (that more than 50% speaks english) should be the story.

The federal govt does not have an official language but individual states may state one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Official_languages_of...

California is one

California was almost empty when it was annexed into the US. Disease etc. Immigration from the rest of the English-speaking US completely dwarfed what was left.

Almost 100% of Spanish-speaking Californians have come in the past 50-70 years. Basically none have historical roots to California.

Not accurate.

What is known as the American state of California was part of the state of Alta California in Mexico, which was annexed by the US during the Mexican American war.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_California

Years later, the Mexicans as well as their descendants, who were Americans by Jus soli (birthright citizenship) were ethnically cleansed during the Mexican Repatriation, where they were kidnapped, put into buses and trucks and sent to Mexico.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation

Many Mexicans are mestizos (mixed with Native Americans), so they have a deeper connection to the land dating to tens of thousands of years and this is reflected in the population genetic haplogroups.

No, those were more recent immigrants. Read your own link.

I am talking about at time of annexation, 1847.

Mestizos have a stronger connection to the land than European settlers.

Nobody has any connection to the land, people are not plants.

So if you get shipped to Turkmenistan tomorrow that wouldn't be a problem right?

There are a lot of open questions here but yes I hope my kids and grandkids would be afforded the same rights as native Turkmen.

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

…the 15.2 million California Hispanics, who total 40% of California's population. 2004 studies estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 have ancestry descended from the Spanish and Mexican eras of California

Parent comment is mostly correct, californios are an insignificant part of California in comparison to eg Tejanos.

>California was almost empty when it was annexed into the US. Disease etc. Immigration from the rest of the English-speaking US completely dwarfed what was left.

>Almost 100% of Spanish-speaking Californians have come in the past 50-70 years. Basically none have historical roots to California.

Correct. I go into more detail on why this is the case elsewhere. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38415835>

I'd imagine in a 70 year timeline, easily 80% of the population has no historical roots to California!

certain native people had trading routes that went all the way from Central America up to Washington State.

source: a group that still does this, and has land near Mt Shasta too

The UK does not have an official language.

De facto it does

De jure, Wales does

Cambridge Dictionary defines official language as:

> the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc.

There is no debate whatsoever that English meets that criteria in the UK

But by that criterion the US also has an official language.

Yes, the de facto language of the US is English.

What's your argument there?

De facto is not the same as official.

Not much of an argument but when it comes to English it is. “Official” as in widely and universally recognised and accepted by government authorities? English in the UK (and US) absolutely is

Though now we’re just descending in to semantics which is not very entertaining

California recognizes Spanish quite a bit, including on official forms like the DMV.

Correct. It’s the defacto.

Indeed, there’s even no official version of English unlike, say, French and Dutch.

That there is no Académie anglaise is a fact which surprises and appalls the French.

The degree to which we do not care what the French think about our lack of an official body overseeing and dictating the language of English can not be accurately described in words. We would have to invent a new unit of measurement to measure it. :)

On Dave's scale, probably a "Shart" https://blogography.com/archives/2019/04/the-dave-scale-of-g...

By that scale it’s “no shits given”

Prescriptivism only gets you so far.

Whenever I see Europeans railing about the destruction of their cultures by small number of immigrants, I want to point to California and be like “you’re doing it wrong.” Pretty much within one generation, everyone here is bilingual, fully integrated, we all enjoy each others company, culture and food etc.

California went from around 85% white European to 35% in roughly a generation (from 1960s to today). Statewide, only 20% of California students are white so their numbers will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.

The US is a melting pot culture and people accept these changes, but there’s no reason that European cultures need to replicate this in their own countries.

Lies, damn lies and then this. 85% counts Hispanic people as white. The 35% does not. Ain't no way this is an innocent mistake. Hispanic people have always been a large portion of California.

No, both numbers refer to non-Hispanic whites.

The Hispanic population of California was 13.7% in 1970. 19% in 1980, 39% in 2020:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanics_and_Latinos_in_Cal...

And over 55% of students in CA public schools today:

https://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/dqcensus/enrethlevels.aspx?a...

The shift in demographics wasn't driven entirely by the increase in the Hispanic population, and in fact I didn’t mention Hispanic population at all. It also was in part driven by immigration from Asian countries.

Not sure why you’re calling me a liar.

I misread your comment. Sorry about that. I misread it because I think of a generation as twenty years and a lifetime as what you described. Sorry again.

Ah, you’re right. It says online that a generation is 20-30 years so I was actually looking over 2-3 generations. Thanks for the correction.

Quite a lot of Hispanic people who might have previously been counted as white no longer identify that way (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-09/south-los-a...).

The article you linked to is about people who previously identified as “white Hispanic” now identifying as “other Hispanic.”

But the numbers I provided are specifically for non-Hispanic whites, who never identified as Hispanic. The article is irrelevant to that demographic shift.

>Hispanic people have always been a large portion of California.

Not true.

Whether Texas or California, the land that is now the American southwest was almost completely empty before the Mexican War; about 80,000 hispanos, or about 1% of Mexico's prewar population, mostly in New Mexico and southern Colorado. They were very, very isolated, living in "islands", and were already dependent on the US, not Mexico, for trade <http://web.archive.org/web/20070517113110/http://www.pbs.org...>. The American takeover and attendant influx of settlers completely changed the region; by 1860 California alone had 380,000 people] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#Pop...> and was a US state.

*85% of Mexican Americans today are from post-World War II immigration.* As late as 1970 <http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/05/01/a-demographic-portrait...> there were five million people of Mexican ethnicity in the US, including one million born in Mexico. Now there are 33.7 million and 11.4 million, respectively. The number of people of Mexican ethnicity has grown by ~16X in 75 years (from ~2 million in 1940), while the US population has grown by ~2.5X. Had the Mexican-ethnic population grown by the same rate as the broader US there would be 5 million today, not 33.7.

History, even recent history, has been rewritten in peoples' minds by popular culture. Los Angeles's stupendous growth in the first half of the 20th century was driven almost entirely off of internal US migration. So many Iowans moved to LA that it was joked that southern California should be renamed "Caliowa". Almost everything we think of about the city, demographically speaking, is a post-1970 phenomenon.

According to Census estimates <http://web.archive.org/web/20080912052919/https://www.census...>, the city of Los Angeles was 7.1% Hispanic (almost all Mexican, of course) in 1940, and 15-17% in 1970. In 1990—let me repeat, two decades later—it was 39.9%. The non-Hispanic white population went from 86.3% in 1940, to 61-63% in 1970, to 37.3% in 1990. As of 2020 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles#Race_and_ethnicity> the city is 46.9% Hispanic and 28.9% non-Hispanic white.

"We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us" is only true for the aforementioned hispanos. If alien space bats had rotated the contiguous US 180 degrees in 1945, all other Mexican Americans would be living in Buffalo and Portland and Boston and Rochester and Detroit. Those cities would be known as the home of Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex cuisine, not LA and El Paso and Phoenix.

I can understand if Europe doesn't want to replicate this, but then they might have to fix their issue with birth rates.

Yes, that’s an issue and it’s affecting countries all over the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa and some Middle Eastern countries are pretty much the only places left with high fertility rates:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...

But we may need to consider more solutions than simply using Africa and the Middle East as a breeding ground to populate the rest of the world?

Believing demographics is a zero sum game is uhh.. well let’s not invoke ~Conways~ Godwin’s law. Why do you think it’s a zero sum game?

I am risking getting flagged to oblivion but I perceive that there are immigrants that integrate better than others.

Asians and south Americans integrate well. Not just in USA, in Europe as well. My country accepted over 500k of Ukrainian refugees into population of just 10m. They integrate outstandingly.

I am not one of the haters that would claim that immigrants are "ruining our culture" but I see issues. Example: the support Hamas gets in certain communities.

I would be interested what would Americans say if a huge influx of North African and Middle Eastern people arrive to USA.

Most people in America are against radical Islam.

The problem is the false dichotomy that because one side is wrong the other one is right. In reality, both sides in the conflict have done wrong, before and during the conflict.

We can all agree that killing an infant or toddler is universally wrong. And under that definition they're both wrong. Excuses just makes it worse.

Parts of the United States has that problem, notably areas of Michigan. North African Muslim communities that are socially conservative and causing issues.

No, I’m from Michigan and it’s not an issue at all. We have a ~100 year history of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and there aren’t any problems aside bigots acting hateful toward them.

I’m not going to flag or downvote you, but this is a very typical European mentality. We have large numbers of immigrants from the places you cite and they integrate fine. I think there are ~1 million people of Middle Eastern descent in California and again, zero issues. At some point, people have to recognize it’s their own culture’s biases that create the social conditions that prevent integration and not the fault of the people themselves.

I am not saying those regions only have bad people. Lots of good people, just some bad apples. But in USA you usually get whole families and not a bunch of young single men. That's one factor that de-risks the integration. The second factor is you get people that can afford plane ticket (likely more educated) and go through some form of border check.

I believe the vast majority of the Middle Eastern people in California are Persians. Again, that's a nationality that fares well in inclusion even in Europe.

I am all for immigration, we need it, we are an aging continent. But we should be a little bit more picky and cautious. And I am not saying we should not get any people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Horn of Africa, it's just often people coming from these countries have a risky mix of low education and culture that doesn't respect women or institutions.

And it's not islamophobia from me, that's why I specifically say culture, not religion. Persians are often muslims and fine, same for Indonesians or Turks.

Problem is we can't have meaningful and polite debate about it like I have with you - you get immediately labeled as racist or xenophobe. Thus the sad rise of far right groups in Europe.

On this note, I am sad that someone is downvoting/flagging you.

I don't think the nation of origin matters a lot here, it's just that the USA is very far away and not as known for state welfare. Imagine what kind of person from any of these countries would go all the way to the US, especially an expensive place like California, instead of Europe. My family here is from the Mid East, they say the same thing. On top of that, we have freer speech/expression so things are less tense.

Also, if you're suggesting the issue is sharia law or something similar, it's weird to list Iran as ok but Syria/Iraq as anti-woman etc. Other way around there.

I’m originally from the Midwest and we have large populations of people from Iraq, Syria, and the Horn of Africa, as well as Palestine, which is a more recent target of bigotry. Look up Minneapolis, Minnesota or Dearborn, Michigan. Overall, those people are more discriminated against there than they would be in California (because the overall culture is more racist against anyone who isn’t white), but still there are almost zero issues with them being integrated into American life. The vast, vast majority of people in the world just want to have peaceful lives where they feel respected and useful and I think Europe is especially bad at giving people from other countries (including from the poorer parts of the EU) that opportunity.

Dearborn is the most Arab-influenced place I've ever been by far. Nowhere in California is like that. Kinda funny considering the surroundings.

It definitely has a unique history, but Michiganders are proud to have it as a part of their state and love to visit for the food and culture! It’s mostly the west side of the state that has issues with bigotry (which unsurprisingly was settled by Dutch religious fanatics).

Yeah, it was fun to visit. Went to two Lebanese restaurants that were even better than my favorites near home in LA.

I grew up in Europe and it's not a European mentality issue. There are very serious social issues at play here.

Geographic proximity makes Europe a prime destination for all the people who don't have the means to immigrate to the US.

Europe has taken in many young men from war torn countries and those men have different standards that sometimes are not compatible with western standards.

You can be all high an mighty and cast blame. But the actual issue is that there are different economical sets of immigrants.

Europe has immigrant ghettos where police are too scared to even be present.

Obviously there are many great immigrants from all backgrounds that are trying to make a better live for themselves, but we can't deny that there are issues.

Here in London some culture integrate well, others don't. How do you explain that with "European mentality"?

I think most Europeans agree we're doing it wrong, but we disagree as to where the solutions are. Generally left leaning parties will want to create support for immigrants through money, education, and some nebulous flexibility with repression. Right leaning parties will want strict adherence to the ideals of the Republic, more enforcement/repression when any transgression is observed, and some nebulous perfected criteria to "let people in" or not. For a decent amount of countries currently the right leaning ideology tends to be taking hold.

How many European countries can you list that have stricter immigration policies today than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago? I can't list a single one. How do you square this with your claim that right leaning ideology is "taking hold"? If anything the actual data points to massively loosened immigration laws and massively loosened penalties for choosing to evade immigration laws.

The right-leaning side is taking hold very recently, is what he probably means.

I can't list a single right-leaning European country government.

Hungary, Poland?

Neither government is right wing.

Right vs left wing, from the very origin of the term, have always been about the two sides in one given country.

The discussion was about immigration in particular.

Often the people railing about that problem point out that in their country integration doesn’t work smoothly but politicians avoid addressing the problem.

It's quite easy to integrate into a culture when the culture itself is relatively young, and by virtue, relatively shallow in comparison to older cultures.

It also helps that most Americans are not direct, so we can all pretend to get along. Whereas in other cultures, like Dutch, Oceaniac, Egyptian, etc., it would be made plain when someone has a problem with you.

These are either positives or negatives depending on one's values, and incentives.

Well. It also depends on who you're importing. I don't think anyone in Europe complains that their Filipinos aren't integrating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com