Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?

I will speak from the perspective of one who emigrated to the US.

Every new group is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" may find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.

Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.

In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth? Why hasn't this happened to the Somalians mentioned elsewhere? The Muslims of Dearborn?

Or look at Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:

* Indian Hindus

* Indian Sikhs

* Indian and Pakistani Muslims

Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>. Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain. But the outcomes are completely different.

I will ask you the same question you posed. Are these differences in outcome the groups' fault? Or the host society's fault?

The US has extended the protection of the law to the law-abiding Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos freeing them up to flourish and build human capital. By contrast, the same state has not only failed to do so for the Black community, but its agents have engaged in extrajudicial killings of the community's members with impunity since they lost their legal "protection" as someone else's private property.

Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].

Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.

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

> Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.

It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.

And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.

It's most significant, though, that you even say "Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds". No one says "French from Algerian muslim backgrounds". A French person with an Algerian background can only be a descendant of one of the million or so ethnic French who colonized Algeria, and is in no case a Muslim. The UK is far ahead of the continent in terms of integration, and the US is light years ahead of that.

I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that mainstream Islam, since then 1970s, has morphed into something closer to extreme ultraorthodox Judaism or an extreme branch of Christianity. And this is certainly an obstacle to integration. But it is not irreversible, and I think in particular rejection by a foreign host culture serves to reinforce that extremism. North Korean defectors have a lot of trouble assimilating in South Korea, despite speaking the same language. Their hard drives are formatted differently, their software is different. The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated. This means teaching individualism and the importance of education and self sufficiency rather than doling out welfare subsistence, but it also means the mainstream culture must actively try to embrace the individuals who wish to become part of mainstream society. Europe fails in both.

W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.

>The goal of a host society should be to study where the differences present themselves acutely and how to alleviate the pain and rejection of individual emigrants without accepting extremism or compromising the values of the culture into which they have immigrated.

Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?

If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.

I like this coding analogy. Would they willingly accept 20 million people with bizarre and incompatible software? Yes but barely because it's in the same language? China has even less desire for the NK regime to fall, as the formatting and language would disrupt the balance in Manchuria.

But I'm not talking about what they want (whatever South Korea says they want about reunification). I mean what preparations are they making for absorbing that mass of people in the event that it happens... in particular, turning them from a faceless mass into prosperous and contributing individual members of a modern westernized society. South Korea has put a lot of study into that question, as did West Germany. So why can't France? They did control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries, after all. What's the difference between the potential collapse of Algeria and the collapse of NK, or at least what is the plan for it?

No one wanted civil wars in Syria and Libya that would send millions of refugees to Europe, but there has been no systematic approach to integrating them and, let's say, updating their software. The prevailing view seems to be that this is temporary rather than just a fraction of what is to come. Anyone looking at the demographics can see that if Europe fails to inculcate its Enlightenment values into its immigrant population within a generation, those values will cease to exist. So I mean what is the real plan?

I am not sure if this argument holds for France and its Muslim citizens. Historically, France didn't "control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries."

They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."

So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.

Maybe I exaggerated. But France controlled essentially all of Muslim west Africa at one point or another, and France's former colonies are the overwhelming source of their immigrant population. Outside of Quebec, the Francophone world is largely Muslim and African. For that reason, the analogy should hold: The people flooding into France were former subjects and partial citizens. South Korea views all Koreans from the North as citizens and has a plan for their integration, just like Israel views all Jews from Ethiopia or Morrocco or France as citizens; and has plans to absorb them. What is France's plan?

Are we really grouping all black people in one group here? The only thing that matters is income in the US. A poor white and a poor black have a lot in common, and the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth. It’s that simple. That being said, generational wealth among the black population has been building all this time. There are black communities today that have very high income levels and rates of homeownership.

>> the reason why we tend to have poorer black vs whites is because of lasting damage from institutional racism over the last century that precluded many opportunities contemporary whites had to begin building generational wealth

Yes. And even after the institutionalized racism was banned in various forms, the social system of racism continues to this day in the form of lower wages for the same jobs, less chance of hiring or buying a home with the same qualifications.

What I am saying is that this is the indigenous European attitude toward migrants, and it is creating generations of ghettoized people who no longer believe they can integrate, just as generations of Black people in America gave up on integration, seeing that they were still kept out on a daily basis even after having achieved legal equality.

"Indian" is not a monolith.

Neither is "Punjabi", "Gujarati", or "Pahari" which are most South Asians in the UK.

I'm South Asian American with family in Europe, and in all honestly Asians in Europe aren't as well integrated because of Europeans.

The US and Canada is nowhere as passive aggressively racist as Europe is (well, Massachusetts is very similar in it's attitude).

In much of North America, there is still buy-in for the "Horatio Alger" story and communities are fairly used to immigrants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com