Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did. It’s obnoxious, diminishes the contributions of others, and is contrary to our own interest, because it gives us a false sense of what made America into such a place that we were willing to leave our family behind to come here.

Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s. We should evaluate these programs on their own terms, not link them into some grandiose fictional narrative. Especially now where AI is going to displace many knowledge workers.

I think you're underselling the value in that time and place of the "just plain folks" who immigrated here — such as your family and, in earlier generations, mine.

My immigrant ancestors were farmers, ordinary workers, and small-business people. Not one of them had much education. But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic. They had the gumption to leave their various countries and come here where opportunities were greater — just as you said was the case for "desis like [you]."

My people filled a need when they came to the U.S. at various times in the 19th and 20th centuries. I imagine your people did the same. Sure, in purely-economic terms they didn't make the near-term contributions that their descendants have. But life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie.

> But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic.

People are motivated, family-oriented, and hard working everywhere. The farmers in my dad's village in Bangladesh certainly are all those things. But they labor within a society that taxes the productive and honest and periodically destroys any accumulated capital with chaos. An American applying that same labor produces a thousand times as much. The difference isn't the laborer, it's the machine against which he is laboring. That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. The operating system of the country was largely in place by the early 19th century and it remains the thing most responsible for our present prosperity.

I don't say that to diminish immigrants. Because isn't even really a point about immigration. It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.

> That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. ... It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.

Now you're overvalorizing what you refer to as Anglo social and political norms. Those norms weren't a monolith — neither were they an unalloyed good.

The Anglos in question famously included enslavers of kidnapped Africans, mainly but not exclusively in the American South. Our whole constitutional system was bastardized to keep those worthies on-side for ratification.

To be sure, the spectrum of Anglo norms included abolition, mainly in the North. But in the South, those norms also included secession and civil war to preserve enslavement as an economic and social system.

IIRC, the enslaver class were largely of English stock — although many white southerners were of Protestant Scots-Irish descent (e.g., John C. Calhoun), and some of Welsh (e.g., Jefferson Davis).

Now let's talk about immigrants' cultural contributions: The residents of some regions of Germany were no slouches commercially. In the U.S., they and Irish Catholics were largely anti-slavery. German immigrants especially were pro-Union; that led to violence against them during the Civil War by Confederates. [0]

(I don't know enough about Dutch contributions to say anything useful about them.)

Bottom line: Let's not fetishize the Anglo-Dutch origins of the American system. The finest crop seeds will be useless without decent soil, water, and light. Seeds don't provide those things. And as summarized above, in our case the seed was far from uniformly good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre

I didn't say it was an "unalloyed good." I said that our prosperity is the product of that system. So are many of the bad things about America! Funnily enough, the immigrants who are eager to write themselves into the story of American prosperity never seem to want to take credit for all bad things about America...

I also think you're missing the forest for the trees. You can find many cultures that enslaved people. The Arabs were trading African and European slaves for a thousand years before Europeans showed up to booming slave markets Africans themselves had built. But you can't find any culture that undertook large-scale worldwide efforts to end slavery, or any one that killed hundreds of thousands of their co-ethnics to end slavery for other people. Are you aware of any other society that has done that?

> you're [sic] criticism overlooks the most important part.

I wasn't trying to present a balanced assessment of Anglo culture, which has clearly been a world leader in many, many respects. I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.

There are good- and bad elements in every culture. Cafeteria-style cultural mixing is how progress happens (modulo intellectual-property law).

> I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.

Of course they should: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oWbNUcOenzU. I didn't know this was debatable. When people say "assimilate into American culture," they mean Anglo-American culture--like the Germans did.

Your theory that Americans can absorb the best elements from different cultures doesn't work in practice. For such evolutionary mechanisms to work, you need a fitness function that reflects which combinations are better. But people have an irrational sentimental attachment to their own culture and co-ethnics. They will stick with things that clearly don't perform rather than adopt things that clearly perform better.

Which circles back to my original point! That's why it's so important to understand why it is that our effort here in America goes so much farther than the same level of effort in our country run according to our cultural norms.

Did German Americans really assimilate? They speak english nowadays and love America but when you look at the norms of Americans it seems like there's more of a mix of the two than just 'anglo american' culture. How people spend their sunday, the drinking of beer, some American food, school system in many ways, parts of the military, some sports (bowling and gymnastics) and the whole sporting club culture (not just for the elite) one can't really say they became Anglo Americans especially in regions where you have many of them (e.g the midwest)

The Amish are descendants of German immigrants, who refuse to this day to assimilate. And that is now an intrinsic part of American culture.

But the Amish are different because of a religion not shared by most German immigrants.

This difference in religion has a huge effect. We know that because the average Amish person is much farther away in culture from the average German living in Germany than the average non-German-ancestry American is.

I mean not really, but I'm using a relative scale. I count them because they're about as similar to Anglos as the Anglo subgroups (Yankees, Southerners, Appalachians) are to each other. Most importantly they have generic American identity--they don't specially identify with or have special affinity for other German Americans. In that respect they're more like Anglos and different from most of the immigrant groups that came after them.

Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.

• One pair of my grandparents were immigrants. Grandpa built a business but to the end of his life his English was tough to understand. Grandma hardly spoke English at all. They lived in a neighborhood surrounded by other immigrants from their home country.

• Their kids — my mom and her siblings — grew up speaking English at school and with each other (apart from when they switched to cut us kids out of the conversation) but not with their parents.

• Their many grandkids — my generation — grew up speaking only English. AFAIK, only one of us knows any of our grandparents' language at all (she took it in school IIRC).

• I also speak neither German nor Irish Gaelic, the languages of my immigrant ancestors on my dad's side of the family. And for practical purposes my own kids speak only English. (My grandkids aren't yet old enough to talk.)

I've repeatedly seen the same phenomenon here in Texas. Example: I have nephews whose great-grandparents on the other side of the family were Mexican immigrants. My nephews speak zero Spanish (AFAIK) and are as American as anyone.

I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.

So: Patience — assimilation into American culture will happen.

> Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.

Here's a book with evidence of how that's not true. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BCKYZ1VY/geneexpre.... Americans with European ancestry display variations in attitudes that are still strongly correlated with those of their countries of origin.

> I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.

People think "speaking English" and "wearing jeans" is assimilation. But that's superficial stuff. How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation? Not very many. I live in Annapolis and it's trivially easy to tell the various European-American groups apart if more than a few of the same type are congregated together (e.g. church gatherings).

> How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation?

1. Austerity and self-deprecation are hardly unique to "WASP culture" (quote unquote). I imagine you know South Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, East Asians, etc., who engage in those practices to a greater or lesser extent.

2. Among those who do practice austerity and self-deprecation, the extent and degree of the practice can vary with time and circumstances.

3. There's a deeper problem: When it comes to understanding why we human animals behave the way we do, we're much like the alchemists of old. In astronmomical terms, behavioral scientists are still working to get to the equivalent of Ptolemy. They've got a ways to go to reach the level even of Copernicus or Kepler, let alone Hubble and LeMaître.

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