> It's the moral right of people in a democracy to control the flow of people to limit cultural change.
Tell me what is changing about American culture. I am curious to know.
Tell me what is changing about American culture. I am curious to know.
When I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s, that taboo was still strongly in place. There were lots of rich people (my dad once ran into Dick Cheney at the CVS). But people drove old Volvos. I only ever saw one Porsche growing up, and it was an old one owned by my neighbor who was an engineer who could do his own work on it. Since then there’s been a huge immigration from south asia and the middle east. And the houses got way more opulent, luxury stores started opening in the malls, people started driving Maseratis, etc.
Many things culturally comes and goes in waves. How can you tell them apart?
[1] The French refer to "les payes Anglo-Saxon," the Anglo-Saxon countries: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24517581. The term describes the deep cultural and political commonalities between the UK, Australia, Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand. Before the mass immigration of the 2000s, Toronto and Sydney were more similar to each other than I think residents of either city would want to admit.
In the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS), 40 US communities were studied, some high in ethnic diversity, some low. In the communities high in diversity, people trusted neighbors less, had fewer close confidants, volunteered less, and withdrew from community life more generally.
One of the principals (namely, Robert Putnam) behind this study described this behavioral pattern with the phrase “hunker down.” In diverse neighborhoods, according to his analysis, residents of all ethnic groups became more socially isolated, including from members of their own ethnic group.