Cultural anxieties about migration

USA is pretty different after European immigration right?

The right-wingers I interact with always use European colonization of the US as their touchstone. The phrase they use is ‘demographic replacement’. So while it’s not a reasonable comparison it is the one they explicitly make.

“Open borders within the UK (and with Ireland) haven’t led to the demise of the Scots, the English, the Welsh or the Irish.”
Umm, you may have noticed that most Irish and Welsh don’t actually speak Irish or Welsh any more (ditto in spades for Manx and Cornish), and no Scots speak Pictish or Goidelic, and very few speak Gaelic. Isn’t that a rather important form of cultural extinction?

Cultural change in most places tends to come from other cultures outside that your internal culture adopts because it’s “cool” and happens in youth, and often in small groups, like anime, which goes both ways, or the influence of American culture abroad, etc.

Chris, can you point to some specific “often-claimed worries about immigration is of cultural loss”? I’m curious to see exactly what they’re talking about.

Let’s all be honest here, there just isn’t any argument you can make about Merkel’s policies that would be accepted by the bloggers here. For academics, they are generally very close-minded, ideologically-centric individuals. There is no point in trying to convince anyone of something they will never accept. It is a waste of time, like arguing with Belle about feminism. There will always be some reason why ‘that’s different’.

Understanding that this is a very different take on the question; speaking as an ecologist, the expansion of spatial scale probably DOES cause significant erosion of local culture, customs, institutions, and networks of trust. However, most of those expansions have occurred within nations; such that people from villages across Italy now move around, etc. Some questions are; which scales impact people the most; which have the most remaining structure; whether, with such rapid communication and transportation, multi-decade place of residence and generation-temporal-scale are the relevant concerns…

If anyone is actually saying they are afraid of “cultural extinction”, they are an idiot and not worth debating with. But in most cases the anxieties are smaller and more local, and relate to how ordinary people actually experience daily life. There are areas of cities in France, for example, which were entirely European until about 25-30 years ago, but which now have a majority population from the Maghreb. Unlike the Algerian immigrants of the 1960s, this population has largely not assimilated, and is in general prevented by poverty and economic obstacles from moving out of these areas. So, there’s no church any more but there’s a mosque, the butchers are all halal, and the majority of women in the street are veiled. I suspect that any such fundamental change in the cultural environment over a relatively brief period of time, would leave most readers of this site feeling a little stranded if they happened to be from the longer-established community.

@17
Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand the question better and would mostly agree there are few real modern examples. One place to look might be within the former Soviet Union where there was signficant forced migration as a means of stamping out prior indigenous culture – obviously not wholly successful, but a program as you describe nonetheless.

Currently perhaps the forced migration of Russians into Eastern Ukraine with the apparent intent to destabilize the population and forment internal discord together with the concurrent seizure of the already largely-culturally Russian Crimea might qualify (the Russians of course claiming that the indigeneous Crimea population was being held captive against their will within Ukraine).

I guess a lot of it depends on what you count as essential culture. If enough Middle Easterners immigrated and voted for the return of the death penalty, would you count that as a significant shift? (You should realize that in many European countries the number wouldn’t need to be that large, as support for the death penalty is already at or above 50%). A reversal of gay rights in some countries seems very plausible, would that count?

CB@9: “*the British state* pursued very aggressive policies of trying to get everyone to speak English”. If you could give references for that happening in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall or Man I would be very interested. Even more so for the Scottish state pursuing very aggressive policies of trying to get everyone to stop speaking Pictish, Goidelic, Gaelic.

As for the decline of Welsh not being ” because lots of English people moved to Wales in search of jobs, was it?”: well yes, if you were fully familiar with the history of the South Welsh coalfields (or of Pembrokeshire), you might see that was exactly what it was. Consider the English-speaking Welsh politician Kinnock, descended from an (English-speaking) Scots miner who, er, moved to Wales in search of a job.

I do think before I post, an activity I would thoroughly recommend. Do you suppose you are less sarcastic than those who disagree with you?

Try another couple of examples. 400 AD, nobody in the present Slovenia/Croatia/Serbia/Montenegro/Macedonia/Bulgaria/Slovakia/Czechia was culturally or linguistically Slavic. A few hundred years later, they were. No state compulsion involved, only migration.

A hundred years or so ago, Kosovo was culturally and linguistically Serbian and Orthodox Christian. Now, it’s Albanian and Muslim. No compulsion by the Albanian State involved, only migration and outbreeding.

The cure for non-white people moving in and outbreeding the whites is simple: White women lie down and do their part. Cf. the Duggars et al. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

No need to feed the statist monster, is there?

Chris, the clearest example of non-state-sponsored immigration that destroyed the local culture is Hawaii, an independent kingdom until 1893. Okay, there’s still a Hawaiian culture. But it was overwhelmed by Anglo and Japanese immigration while it was an independent state.

There may be other examples, but they must be few and unusual, precisely because no state that is strong enough to control its borders has ever permitted the kind of immigration experiment you propose.

It seems to me, in fact, that your question is designed to be answerable in the way that you want it to be answered. It is meant to include only immigration to stable states which have had, until very recent times, restrictive immigration policies, and which continue to have substantial control within a larger unrestrictive area.

From the 19th c onward, every country of immigration – the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Argentina, Britain, France, and a few others – has had strict border controls which are periodically liberalized and then made more restrictive, depending on the economy, the number of immigrants seeking entry, and the ease of assimilation of the new immigrants.

A good example is Australia. I believe it’s generally accepted that without its “White Australia Policy,” in force until the 1970’s, Australia today would be an ethnically Asian state. Current policy restricts immigration to easily assimilable people of any race as long as they have skills and money, and to a small number of asylum-seekers.

Chris, you say that “open borders within the UK” haven’t led to the demise of the Scots, Welsh, and Irish. This is a ridiculous example, because Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales are not countries of immigration.

A better example of this sort is Canada. Canada as a whole restricts most immigration to people with money, education, and business skills. But Quebec, which controls its own immigration policy, will generally keep you out unless you speak French. Other Canadians can move there, but provincial policies on education and employment make Quebec distinctly unwelcoming. If Scotland were a country of immigration, it likely would demand the same sort of immigration controls that Quebec demanded and received as condition for remaining in a federal system.

So what you are saying is that no one can find an example of cultural loss to a strong state with control of its borders, without conceding that every such state takes steps to assure that it won’t happen.

PS- to be clear, I’m not contending that the White Australia Policy was a good thing. I’m pointing out as a fact that without it, Australia would not be culturally European and predominantly British – “an outpost of the British race,” as one former prime minister put it.

@Chris, yes, these places exist, it’s just that most people don’t go there unless they have to. And no, we’re not talking about very large areas. But that’s the point. As Ronan has also pointed out, people generalise from their own experiences, among the people they live with and see every day, the shops they patronise and the schools their children go to. Whether they are therefore “wrong” is a matter of perspective and scale. Culture, as others have remarked, is a complex thing, and means different things to different people. Cultural exchanges (where on earth would British cooking be without them?) are often positive. If you stretch the definition of culture to include political and ethical ideas, the issue is much more complex. Then, a problem arises when groups have antithetical views on a cultural issue which are not reconcilable or capable of compromise. Many ethical/cultural issues are binary rather than a question of degree – the death penalty has already been mentioned. Support for that is likely to increase mathematically, as migrants arrive from countries where it is the norm, as it was in the West fifty years ago, and settle in countries where it is no longer the norm. Likewise, the Right in France is hoovering up votes from within parts of the immigrant community at the moment, because their views on social issues tend to be more conservative than the average French voter. It’s not impossible that a government of the Right in 2017 could decide to repeal the laws on homosexual marriage, for example.
In it’s pure form, the phenomenon you are describing is almost always a product of conflict, if not actual war and forced displacement. (The example of Kosovo before 1989 is an interesting exception, as far as I know). But what is much more common is fundamental cultural change – an obvious case is the slow Islamisation of East Africa because of trade contacts and immigration from the Gulf, and the later influence of Indian culture when the British settled Indian traders there. Unlike the Arabisation of North Africa (which was violent, ask any Berber) this was basically peaceful, but over time did fundamentally change the culture of the area, and has political repercussions to this day.

It’s not going to fit your bleg as stated (and indeed maybe nothing will), but Brussels from a linguistic perspective has some elements of it: the people moving there for jobs linked to the international bureaucracies speak their own language … and French, which is not the language of the Flemish suburbs. A local issue, not a national one, but a real issue for the Flanders areas around the capital.

“Cultural extinction” doesn’t seem like a helpful standard, does it? Few cultures become “extinct,” they simply grow less and less distinct from a dominant one. The Creek aren’t “culturally extinct,” but few would say their culture isn’t substantially diminished by Anglo-European culture. Aztec culture still exists, it’s just very diminished.

If that’s the standard, I think we can safely say that NO level of immigration will lead to cultural extension, at least not on a human time scale. Maybe in 400 years things will be different, but that’s a huge time line. If it takes longer than America has existed for something to change, maybe it’s not worth worrying about?

I’d look at American ethnography. There’s research on American relocation from state to state (bringing Southern culture to California, for instance. California was a very racist state for a while). And the initial impact of immigration into the US and how various different communities changed in different ways. German immigration into Pennsylvania and Ohio created a different culture than Norwegian immigraton into the Dakotas and Minnesota. And the Irish into Massachusetts. And etc.

What about White South Africa? Are the Afrikaans very different since Great Britain took over and started immigration?

9: ‘It wasn’t because lots of English people moved to Wales in search of jobs, was it?’

Yes, it was (partly). About 100,000 English people migrated to the Welsh valleys in the first decade of the 20th century. This caused a sharp change in language use there and began a rapid decline in Welsh. Until then, the mining towns had grown rapidly through migration from Welsh-speaking areas, resulting in a major boost for Welsh. The English migration was entirely economic, not state-sponsored. (Source: Brinley Thomas, The Industrial Revolution and the Atantic Economy, Routledge 1993)

Another thing to share: As as somebody mostly raised and is living in Houston Texas (spent a large part of time all over the south, as my dad was in the army), I know very many people who take a dim view of Californians who move here. The idea is that Texas has managed itself pretty well, and when people move here, they tend to it for economic reasons e.g. job growth, without altering their political views, and people see it as a recipe for disaster. Even if it’s something as simple as wanting people to stop using plastic bags at the grocery store (which, at least some Europeans do, so that’s socialist and not allowed), some people resent that a liberal family from California have an equal vote as someone who’s lived here for decades and voted (contrary to the Californian majority) against many of the political decisions that lead to (and reinforced) many of the political differences between California and Texas in the first place.

Igor Belanov@16:”I’m really struggling to define what British or English culture actually is”. Query does that apply to, say, Russian, Jewish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese culture? If not, why not?

David@36: “Cultural exchanges (where on earth would British cooking be without them?) are often positive”. Indeed. Look at those wonderful examples of French cooking, le biftek (aux pommel frites) et le rosbif.

@hix – my observation here in Australia is that people with grandchildren of marriageable age are most scared of this

The character and culture of the United States have been dramatically changed by immigration. The arrival of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Italians, etc. changed a country that had previously been almost uniformly English and Scots-Irish Protestant. Political movements like the know-nothings, the temperance movement, and various manifestations of the rural / urban split – that continue to this vary day – reflect and embody the cultural divisions between this older America and the newer, immigrant America.

And the immigrants won in the end. The traditional white Democratic voters were Catholics and Jews in the big city, the children of these immigrants. Given that the Democratic party has championed massive cultural changes at the cultural expense of the remnant Protestant ethnie, I think it is safe to say that the US is a great counterexample.

You and I might not care, but that is purely because our side won.

Han migration into Manchuria during the Qing Dynasty is the closest to what you are looking for. After the Manchu Qing conquered Han China, they set up laws restricting Han migration to Manchuria. However because of various demographic and economic reasons, lots of Han migrated to Manchuria in the 1800s, so that today the area is overwhelmingly Han and the ethnic Manchus have been largely assimilated into Han culture.

Wikipedia has a nice article on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuang_Guandong

Chinese immigration to parts of southeast Asia might work as examples as well.

Chris,

I think if you look at the three main cultural displacements being discussed here (California, Texas, and Hawaii), one common thread is that in each case there was a point at which the locals could see power slipping away and then everything was all downhill from there.

Texas is an excellent example. By the time the Mexicans became really worried about the growing numbers and strength of the incomers, it was too late to do anything about it. The incoming settlers gradually came to outnumber the Mexicans and ultimately the anglos took power and declared independence from Mexico, in part over the question of slavery.

California was a similar story. The early anglo immigrants to my home state were always more respectful of the Mexican and Spanish cultures and weren’t interested in slavery but the end result was the same from a Mexican perspective. The land was no longer theirs; Mexicans became second class citizens in the place of their birth—and over time the position of their descendants has worsened in every respect.

Hawaii was a similar story. The trickle of incomers became a flood and the anglos became powerful enough to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy and install themselves as rulers. And, perhaps borrowing from the example of the Normans, a handful of white families gained control over nearly every square inch of the islands. Now, you could argue that Hawaiian culture wasn’t displaced because the natives could still dress up in their colorful costumes, have luaus and do the hula but basically the Hawaiians and their culture are now subordinate to American culture. From a Hawaiian perspective, it’s clear that they lost everything they had—including their culture.

I don’t feel comfortable talking about some of the other examples such as AH’s discussion of the Han migration to Manchuria or the example of Wales but it seems to me that ff one thinks about mass migrations in general (whether because a people are conquered by invaders or are displaced en mass and go looking for a new home), I can’t think of any instance in which the people on the receiving end of a mass migration got the better of the deal.

The British government ran a centuries-long persecution campaign against the Irish and Scottish Gaelic languages, Gaelic culture and Gaelic-speaking Catholics. This included the infamous Penal Laws in Ireland, genocide by starvation and the forced depopulation of much of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd. As late as the 20th century the GPO refused to deliver letters addressed in Gaelic.

In the late 20th century Cornwall was inundated by a mass emigration of English, to the extent that they now out-number the native population, and show few signs of being willing to assimilate. Coupled with the death of traditional Cornish industries such as fishing and mining, what remains of traditional Cornish culture (the language already having been lost) is endangered.

As of today, 28 per cent of Australians (6.6 million people) were born overseas. Of those, 1.8 million came from the UK and NZ, but the next four source countries were all in Asia.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/latestProducts/3412.0Media%20Release12013-14

In the most recent Census, 43 per cent of Australians had at least one overseas born parent

http://abs.gov.au/websitedbs/censushome.nsf/home/CO-59

CB@62: The local elites wanting to modernise take seems to be consistent with John Davies’ take on the Blue Books affair and its fallout in his ‘Hanes Cymru’, at least when it comes to middle class Nonconformist types [1] (working class ones are a different matter). The primary driver of the Anglicisation of the Valleys would probably just be good old capitalism, I’d guess, though I doubt that the low status that Welsh had aquired particularly helped there. As Ronan says, it’s complicated. I can certainly see why someone who’s been on the wrong end of linguistic prejudice might see it in colonial terms, though, or why one might start thinking along those lines, because there are some odd attitudes to peripheral regions in some quarters. (An introduction to a story in a horror anthology I have somewhere has the author saying soemthing like ‘it’s hard to get over how strange Wales is’; ‘oh,’ I thought, ‘*that’s* what being exoticised feels like…’)

[1] Seimon Brooks has apparently made a similar point from an explicitly Welsh Nationalist perspective in his ‘Pam na fu Cymru?’ [‘Why wasn’t there a Wales?’], which seems to have poked at some sacred cows. I’ve not read it yet, mind.

Before I head off to work: Another contributing factor to the impression of colonialism (though it may not be formally such) in Wales is probably the Capel Celyn incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capel_Celyn); that’s probably the formative moment for both Welsh devolutionism and Welsh nationalism proper.

Ozajh@51:

Would those people have an equal problem with an arch-conservative family moving to Texas from (for example) the Appalachians?

If this type of person were politically liberal and from the city, I can see there being tension if a white-trash family who used to live in trailer park moved into the suburbs. But I think overall, since strict border enforcement is largely a conservative platform, it’s difficult find perfectly analogous situations that would go both ways. I chose California and Texas because they’re often used as political contrasts for the propoganda of both states, and are likely to butt heads on political issues as a proxy for cultural values, rather than just seeing culture or class as the defining feature.

conservative appalachia will probably have a pro-gun stance for example, and a major distrust of anything the government does, will likely be against gay marriage, against policy changes regarding climate change, will be for the death penalty, etc. They’ll be looked down on for those views in the city, and by liberals, but more likely as uncultured swine as bigots than as an affront to local popular sovereignty.

The phenomenon, as I see it, has to do with how more and more people are “voting with their feet” in order to live in communities that have agreeable political views (rather than, say, looking for a community with schools that don’t push unethically sourced history textbooks). The result of this political balkinization is that when you do move for (putatively) politically neutral reasons like a job opportunity, you end up de fact I doing this “voting with your feet” thing anyway, and not in the direction residents want.

I’d say at root, it’s similar to the conversation Europe is having about economic migrants being far inferior immigrants than refugees, with the understanding that each state’s population is to blame for relative success, and this success is largely a matter of policy. So when people do move for economic reasons it can seem like you jumped ship, on a mess you helped create, are coming over here to gain the benefits of a system you didn’t help, but if your political views match that of your previous state, you’re now part of he problem. State patriotism and loyalty probably plays some role.

Laws take a very long time (generations) to do their business (Solon, and the Torah, make a big deal about this, that the law should be written on men’s hearts, and not just followed in deed) and in the presence of a large “othered” population, I can see how one’s personal contribution to the multigenerational project of writing good laws can feel threatened by so much as increased support for the opposing party, especially if the entire set of incoming political beliefs is generally at odds with yours.

@ Vanya

What your second paragraph is describing are the effects of economic and cultural imperialism, and affect the host population almost as much as any immigrants.

We should really be discussing immigration as a symptom, not a cause.

L2P writes: If it takes longer than America has existed for something to change, maybe it’s not worth worrying about?

On the contrary, anything that’s as recent and ephemeral as this flash-in-the-pan gimcrack United States is not worth worrying about – only things that last much longer than that are culturally significant, like Irish resentment of the English.

You’ll need to acknowledge and address all that mysterious metaphysical stuff. And how are you gonna do it?

The exact same way we investigate rationally and act upon other products of the human mind. There are different ways to go at it, I guess, but my favored one is to show that the mysterious metaphysical stuff actually stems from very often quite concrete phenomena-often the nature of familial arrangements (e.g the relative status of men and women, the strength of parental involvement in education…) and the organization of the daily social institutions individuals interact with (schools, businesses, healthcare centers…)-and hence are in fact eminently amenable to rational discourse and political action.

Fuzzy Donlop at 73,

Australia and Hawaii aren’t actually the main examples of a local culture being wiped out by immigrants. There were a number of others discussed, including California and Texas where immigrants largely refused to be assimilated into the Mexican culture and ultimately replaced it with their own. Another highly relevant example of cultural usurpation would be the Han migration into Manchuria that was discussed by AH at 54.

I think the small number of examples being discussed here is more the result of the way Chris has framed the question because it excludes nearly all of the many historical examples of cultures being swamped because they were the product of some kind of collective or state action on the part of the incomers. If that limitation were removed, the most obvious example of cultural obliteration that would be very familiar to most of us would be that of England

Also, in the examples of Hawaii, Texas and California, the locals weren’t simply overwhelmed by the raw numbers of immigrants but rather by the immigrants tendency to retain their identities as Americans and to strongly resist assimilation by the native cultures. Indeed, in each of these examples, the incomers seized power even though they were still only a small (but powerful) minority and justified their actions by the “moral imperative” of “civilizing” (i.e., eradicating) the local culture.

Similarly, as Vanya at 69 points out, the earliest displacements of Native Americans should indeed be on the table for discussion since those displacements were the result of immigration and not the product of deliberate choices by England. I think it’s worth noting that even when the settlers were dwarfed by the native population, they utterly rejected the culture and languages of the Native Americans. The immigrants retained their own language and largely refused to learn the languages of their new homeland. They kept manner of dress in preference to that of the natives and even kept the architectural styles of their English homeland. In short, the incomers strongly resisted assimilation.

The incomers overwhelmed and displaced the natives very quickly. But this wasn’t the result of any policy emanating from London. It was entirely the product of the settlers voracious appetite for land and their development of towns and cities that mirrored those of their country of origin.
It wasn’t until the Jackson administration that there was any significant state involvement in removing the natives from their land and eradicating their culture.

Another point worth elaboration is the one made by Ze K at 74. Their are some significant implication in your assumption that, in the absence of the “white Australia” policy, it is likely that Australia would today be ethnically, politically and culturally similar to Singapore. Even though this is something which you dismiss as a triviality, it seems clear that a very significant percentage of Australians would rather live in Australia instead of Singapore. Just as the Aboriginals almost certainly wanted to live in their version of Australia rather than in the white European one.

But, in a way, I think you have inadvertently highlighted the basic disagreement that is running through this comment thread. You seem to be making the rather breezy assumption that if being Singapore is okay with you then it ought to be okay with everybody. Essentially, I understand you to be saying that’s it irrational for people in the traditional countries of immigration to like things as they are and that it is unnecessary for the people who are the unwilling hosts for to have a say in their future since the result of immigration is always beneficial for everyone as long as being Singapore is okay with you. I think that’s the nub of many of the differences here and it’s something that isn’t being discussed buts need to be.

I think it is also worth exploring the consequences of lack of immigration to wealthy countries. What is the possibility that, without an open immigration policy, population growth would stall or collapse? GDP growth stall? Debt to GDP ratio rise even more? Interest rates rise? Bubbles burst? Hedge funds go under? Wall Street crash? Why exactly is immigration so important to rich and powerful nations?

It could be that actively importing workers or just letting them in is easier in the short run than figuring out the contradiction of non-expansionary capitalism.

@ 80

‘Replacement’ isn’t really the best word, it suggests some form of ethnic cleansing which clearly isn’t the case with many of those examples. In the case of Dutch/Frisian, Saami/other Scandinavian and Scots/English the majority of people have made a conscious decision over a period of time to use more widely spoken languages in public life that offer greater prospects, social mobility or cultural opportunities. Eventually the ‘stronger’ language comes to dominate private life as well. That’s not to say that they made a free choice, just that socio-economic and political trends were propelling them in a certain direction.

Flemish and French is perhaps not the best example either, as the status of Flemish has been increasing over the past 50 years and the international status of Brussels is something of a special case.

I guess a key point for me is that the Irish and Italians didn’t arrive in the US and perpetuate Irish or Italian culture there, but that the whole evolved into something new. There are Italian Americans, of course, but they don’t resemble Italians.

If the issue is the loss of culture familiar to the current residents due to the influence of significant numbers of immigrants, what difference does it make if the the new culture is the same as the traditional culture of the immigrants?

Mitch @76, I wrote that last sentence badly, I meant that Australia would be just as it is *now* politically (a multi-party democracy), and would look like Singapore culturally in the sense that people have many different ethnolinguistic origins–in Singapore, Chinese (especially southern Chinese with various native languages), Tamil, Malay, and Australia in this scenario keeps large numbers of British, Irish, and various Europeans. On the other hand, there might have been considerable white flight without the White Australia policy, with many white Australians being unwilling to live alongside Asians without a guarantee of political and social dominance. The fact that there was a White Australia policy in the first place suggests that there would have been at least some white flight without it, but surely not so much that Australia would resemble Singapore demographically. That’s why I included the discourse of immigration among the factors that need to be considered. An extreme white flight scenario might, strictly speaking, fit Chris’ definition, but it wouldn’t make sense to call this the destruction of a local culture/polity due to immigration–more like the dissolution/disestablishment of a diasporic colony b/c white supremacy was an essential part of its social contract, and couldn’t be maintained.

I did kind of skip over Texas and California (though I did acknowledge them) as cases where a native culture was overwhelmed by immigrants, and didn’t explain my reasoning for that, which is that I think they actually don’t fit the ‘not state-supported’ criteria as well as people have assumed. Even without the US government organizing immigrants to Texas and California, ongoing US westward expansion and the idea of Manifest Destiny (even if not by that name) surely had at least an indirect role. So I think these fit the bill much less well than Hawai’i, where there was an indigenous polity that was wholly supplanted/overtaken by immigrants.

The OP seems founded on assumptions about a distinction between voluntary versus state-sponsored migration (axiomatically good versus evil, apparently). Yet various ethnic groups somehow disappeared from places they once frequented, long before anything remotely resembling a modern “state” existed. I rather suspect that how subscribers choose to classify historical examples reflects their moral judgment of outcomes more than any actual difference in mechanism.

How to classify, say, historical immigration to Taiwan? Yes, an ethnic group can become a demographic minority in its own homeland. Yes, cases where this happens likely correlate with nasty geopolitics (after all, why were the original residents unable to make territorial claims stick?). No official program of assimilation or extermination required – enough warm bodies without all that much respect for minority rights will render the original residents politically irrelevant.

Yes, conservative rhetoric about immigration is a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys. But let’s not pretend that demographic changes have no social repercussions. Lines like “Open borders within Europe haven’t caused the Germans and French to disappear” (wow, open borders did not obliterate ethnic identities within one generation!) do not convince me that OP is fully baked.

There are plenty of cases from throughout history–I’d also throw the Italian/German migrations to Latin America as a case of dramatic cultural changes. But what is just as common is that a lack of integration results in a majority/minority dynamic results from both groups attempting to preserve their own cultures. I’m thinking of places like Sri Lanka or East Africa where ethnic distinctions have proved incredibly resilient. The Gulf States are an extreme example where rights given to new migrants are fairly minimal and one can imagine ethnic distinctions surviving long term. The worst case scenario is that these differences result in violence, often by the group in power. But minority groups can “revolt” as well, especially if they have difficulty adapting culturally or economically. But looking historically it’s surprising how common it is for states to step in to help maintain distinctions between groups.

The late Roman Empire is the obvious analogy for the weak and bureaucratic EU.
EU = Roman Empire
refugees from middle east = barbarians
ISIS = Dshinghis Khan

#91 – “you’re setting the bar too low.”
Too low? Chris has set the bar at “cultural extinction.” As long as “identities continue to be available in some recognizable form,” no one has a right to complain. And by implication, anyone who does complain or even worry is a racist.

I think Bloix is concerned that Israel isn’t doing its part to take in Syrian refugees.

I was thinking about the sort of people CB references—Sidgwick/Walzer types. But really, if migration across state* borders is on a par with retirees moving Florida, as far as cultural loss is concerned, then I’ll happily concede the argument. (Presumably, opposition to one implies opposition to the other, again as far as grounds of cultural loss are concerned?)

*”State” as in nation-state.

Wouldn’t an Australia that had not had the white Australia policy have likely ended up much more culturally similar to Singapore, and politically about the same*?

The White Australia policy was abolished nearly 50 years ago (in practice, technically it was scrapped earlier). From 1901, when it came in, to WWII, migration was relatively limited anyway. The big postwar migration, while almost entirely European, brought in people very different from the “98 per cent British” prewar population (Aborigines were literally not counted).

We’ve had millions of migrants since the end of White Australia, with non-racial entry criteria. In political terms, they’ve made no obvious difference. Some groups (mostly from countries with rightwing governments) have supported the leftish parties, and vice versa.

With unrestricted migration, as opposed to large scale but controlled migration, things might be different. But I don’t think that the White Australia policy as such made a big difference.

* If I read your clarification correctly, “the same as it actually is”

Tom Hurka @89 It’s self-evident that, if your cultural identity includes the requirement that you live in an ethnically homogeneous community, it will be challenged by the arrival of people who are different. I don’t think it’s raising the bar to exclude this as an example.

” But even without immigration, if you leave a country for, say, 30 years, and come back, you’ll find that it is not recognizable as the one you left.”

I went back to Japan after a 2o year break (1989 to 2009) and it was shocking how almost nothing had changed, at least superficially. Even the prices in restaurants had barely moved.

CB@6L: if you include the eclipse of the Welsh and Irish languages among your examples of “local elites hitching their wagon to the more successful modernising project next door” then you are partly correct, though massive immigration also had something to do with it, as Bartholomew@42 pointed out. May I point out, as non-sarcastically as possible, that the process you mention is remarkably different from your original claim of *the British state* pursu[ing] very aggressive policies of trying to get everyone to speak English.

@99 Chris
You could make this argument about any policy! Now you seem to be calling for a study with “controls” rather than throwing around anecdotes.

Suffice to say there’s historical evidence for cultural change–not that this justifies anti-immigrant rhetoric! And my reading is that cultural integration is the exception rather than the rule.

The concern is not so much “erosion of difference” as multiplication of difference within a given political space, leading to social fragmentation, reduced communication and trust, less civic and class solidarity and less willingness to pay for public goods, as per the well known Putnam study http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/?page=full

This discussion on countries as providers of club goods is a bit abstract but also mildly relevant: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2015/10/countries-as-clubs-open-borders-and-debtgdp-ratios.html

(I haven’t read any comments above)

Lithuania/Lithuanian maybe comes close. Between roughly end of 15th century until end of 18th century Lithuania was united with Poland (sometimes more, sometimes less). While it wasn’t primarily immigration that was responsible, it played a role in voluntary Polonization that occurred, up to a point where the Lithuanian language was close to dying out (local customs much less so) .

That’s sort of an exception though.

Bloix @113, I think the key words in JQ’s comment @100 are “as such”, so as you observed, while the entry criteria are not racial, they have a (surely intended) effect of making immigration much easier for white people.

The UK is still by far the largest source of immigrants to Australia, followed by New Zealand.

This isn’t true of current migration flows (as opposed to the entire overseas-born population) . China and India have recently been the two biggest sources, though the numbers bounce about quite a bit.
https://theconversation.com/the-changing-face-of-australian-immigration-14984

“I’m struggling to think of any cases of cultural extinction due to the kind of immigration that results from individuals and families simply choosing to move to another country for a better or different life… In the absence of deliberate state action and political mobilization, peoples of ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic distinctiveness seem to be pretty robust entities.”

“@josh – well the worries that get voiced are often rather incoherent, but a lot of UKIPpers in the UK (and certainly those to their right) will claim that their country is about to disappear because of immigration.”

That’s because unlike you the UKIPers correctly see the entire project of political union and harmonisation across Europe as state sponsored. And the refugee housing and resettlement programs. And the mosque building programs. And the EU cultural exchange, and multicultural and anti-racist education programs. And the Arabic teaching programs. And so on… It’s all deliberate state action and political mobilization.

What’s incoherent is viewing the UK teaching English to its citizens as “very aggressive policies”, while portraying the elephant in the room as merely “individuals and families simply choosing to move to another country for a better or different life”.

What does “state-sponsored mosque-building program” mean?

There are a range of possibilities.

In this thread’s context, it doesn’t seem that “state-sponsored” is clearly defined–I’d say mosque (and church, and shopping center) building in most parts of the US is state-sponsored in the same way that the Puritan settlement in Massachusetts was state-sponsored–it’s done with state permission but not state funds.

Bloix @111 How many displaced Chinese would have migrated to Australia during the period of more or less unceasing war from 1911 to 1950, if they could have?

Maybe not as many as you think. As I understand it, one thing people have consistently found studying immigration is that very few people who could migrate do migrate, and then where they do go is determined a lot by what places they know about, often through previous migrants from their area (i.e. chain migration), and of course how much money they have. So it might actually have taken a lot more than just an open borders policy to drastically increase the number of Chinese migrants to Australia from 1911-1950 (or rather, it might have taken a very long time for an open borders policy to result in vastly higher levels of migration, especially in the 1st half of the 20th century when motorized transportation wasn’t ubiquitous).

Nick @123 For myself, the abstract idea of ‘wanting to preserve your culture’ sounds normal; but when I actually look at what it implies, not so much. My kids, and the people around me, can go ahead and change all they want and live how they wish, and it’s OK if I wouldn’t recognize their lives, 100 years from now.

Besides which, pretty much nobody I’ve ever heard defend “Western Civilization” actually likes Western Civilization as it is. What they actually like, when you get down to brass tacks, is what Western Civilization would have been like, according to some bizarre theory of theirs, if not for ‘multiculturalism’, ‘decadence’, or whatever the most current term of abuse is.

Same with other people who claim to want to preserve their culture. An extreme case is all of the language reform projects in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations in the 20th century, and related cultural reform projects. (Not that these projects were motivated by a fear of immigrants–it was more like ‘we would not have fallen behind Europe if only it weren’t for the corruption of our culture by Arab/Persian/Turkish/whatever culture.’) Apparently even Greek cooking was ‘reformed’ to make it more ‘European’ by introducing/increasing use of heavy cream sauces such as are used in French cooking (which I presume hadn’t ever been used to that extent in Greek cooking), because Greece was ‘really’ a European country, which I guess meant it should be more like France, and was held back in this respect by the 400-year Turkish occupation. (All of this fits Corey Robin’s ‘Reactionary Mind’ theory quite well I think.)

A huge number of the explanations above about why immigration shouldn’t be so scary are precisely the same as the creative destruction arguments used in support of capitalism. (Economy/culture is an emergent property from the actions of lots of people doing their own thing. Economy/culture isn’t hurt overall by the change caused by new people/industries overtaking old ones. Economy/culture shouldn’t be considered a static object. The damage to economy/culture really comes from state meddling not the ‘natural’ process)

It is odd how many on the right seem to whole heartedly embrace the capitalism argument but reject the open borders argument, and how many on the left seem to reject or want to significantly problematize the creative destruction in capitalism argument but embrace the open borders argument. It seems as if Quiggin might be the only person who is consistent on the issue. (And I include myself in the criticism).

In the absence of deliberate state action and state sponsored projects, has capitalism ever led to the complete extinction of a people?

Ten years ago an article appeared with the interesting title “When States Prefer Non-Citizens Over Citizens: Conflict Over Illegal Immigration into Malaysia”, Int’l Studies Quarterly v.49 n.1. Author is Kamal Sadiq. Had to do with why, for various reasons, Malaysia was encouraging illegal immigration by Filipinos and Indonesians. Beyond that I don’t remember the details, but thought it might be worth mentioning as a presumably unusual case.

#129 – yes, of course. Chris’s use of the two terms interchangeably makes the discussion quite a bit less focused than it could be.

Stephen, I don’t mean to imply that Chris is arguing in favor of massive, uncontrolled immigration. In past posts he’s made his concerns clear. But look at the conclusion of this OP – he can’t think of a case in which a culture was driven to extinction by immigration, THEREFORE. although some people may think that national groups “needed borders and border control to preserve themselves, mostly they don’t.”

The examples he gives of open borders that, he says, prove his case, aren’t open borders at all – they’re restricted to people who are culturally similar to the country of immigration, and who are not in the sort of desperate straits that would lead them to emigrate from their home countries in the millions.

“Many of these arguments echo concerns over gentrification. Cultural extinction is a high bar, and I would think many of the nativists protesting immigration and gentrification are not really worried about extermination, but rather a cultural loss.”

How does a cultural loss occur? No one can take away my culture. Concerns about ‘cultural loss’ are concerns about others exercising freedom in a way one doesn’t like. Even if there is some real concern there, the problem is that complaining about how others could adversely impact the culture if we let them be free has historically been the most common form of dog whistle politics.

The demographically driven rise of the Shia in Lebanon is another good example.

Because, really, the question here is whether an increase in the number of people in one group within a state can affect the dominant culture within that state. Whether from immigration or higher birth rates, the question is whether the dominant culture is able to assimilate groups faster than those groups can otherwise grow.

Personally I struggle to think of any time in history where a large amounts of normal, garden-variety immigration made the target country worse, and there are a lot of examples to the contrary, where immigration was a crucial and important phenomenon. The opposition to it probably comes from the same part of the reptilian brain as mercantalism, that imagines that every time you gain something, I must lose something equivalent.

Hoosier, Ironically I was just in South Africa where I heard that exact argument made many times, but not about their more recent immigration crisis (Zimbabwe), but rather the prior immigration crisis (English settlers).

Map Maker @ 140, I’m tempted to say that there’s a difference between immigration and colonialism, but it’s been said many times before already, and if it hasn’t registered by now, I doubt repetition will do the trick.

@ Mitch Guthman, I’d say that’s the wrong question. The right question is, is immigration the cause of the plight of any of those groups, or is it something else which is the cause?

Layman,

I’m certainly no historian but I do have a pretty strong feeling that if the Angles, Jutes and Saxons hadn’t emigrated to England they wouldn’t have slaughtered huge number of Celts before finally subjugating them and obliterating their language and culture. So, yes, I think it’s fair to say that immigration was the root of their problem. Certainly it wasn’t “something else” from a Celtic perspective.

Were the lands which are now Bulgaria, and the former Jugoslavia, ever Germanic-speaking?

And is not “sort of oozing slowly” exactly the kind of non-state-driven migration that CB thinks does not lead to cultural extinction?

“and how many on the left seem to reject or want to significantly problematize the creative destruction in capitalism argument but embrace the open borders argument”

This is a strange claim to make, especially considering most people here appear to disagree with CB. I think a more convincing case could be made for social issues (particularly drugs, where I think people consistently understate the negatives associated with legalisation ) but it isn’t unusual that both “left and right ” would have institutions and norms and policies they want to maintain, and ones they don’t find value in.
Personally, I think our politics these days is too concerned with morality and ethics, and too little on the much aligned “technocratic” aims of problem solving and controlled progress. There is something from the left and right these days of the 1950 irish elites ideal citizen; religious, austere, nationalist, pious, willing to sacrifice material interest for abstract notions of the greater good. An overabundance of ethics and lack of pragmatism. Of course when this runs into people, in all their messiness , as they really are, the results aren’t exactly as expected.

I’m surprised that out of 150 posts, only three or four have mentioned gentrification and neighborhood replacement. What ever happened to the Irish working class community of the Castro in San Francisco? And the various waves of ethnic replacement in Manhattan’s Lower East Side? And while I suppose the old Jewish community of Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park neighborhood has still left Langer’s Deli as a remnant, the question now is how long will the Salvadoran culture hold out against the inevitable wave of speakeasy cocktail joints and indie music venues that are certainly on their way.

@ 147 Peter T

And don’t forget that original peaceful cultural replacement, the shift from Sumerian to Akkadian speaking elite in Mesopotamia in about 2000BC.