Now you’re backtracking. You asserted above that you don’t see a “cogent” reason for “higher barriers to immigration.” Now you’re quibbling about how “dramatically” immigration changes the country, whether the changes are “for the worse,” and about how the changes depend on how immigration is “controlled.”
We agree 200 million Bangladeshis overnight would be a bad thing, and 1,000 per year is immaterial. But what’s your basis for asserting that there’s no “cogent” reason for “higher barriers to immigration” than we have now? It seems to me that the acceptable point between 200 million Bangladeshis and 1,000 Bangladeshis depends on all sorts of factors, and “cogent” arguments can be made based on various assumptions.
Your problem is that you are relying on assumptions about those factors that you either can’t or won’t state. Which isn’t surprising because you’re getting emotional over what is a purely logical analysis.
> Yet they're still subject to American laws, regulations, and supervision.
A telling concession! Woodrow Wilson observed, in his seminal work on the administrative state, that multiculturalism compounded the challenges of democracy: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad... (“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes…. And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans….”)
Wilson’s solution was top-down control of the country by civil servants and bureaucrats. Wilson’s successors succeeded, ironically by mastering ethnic machine politics to mobilize immigrants. Today, we live in Wilson’s administocracy, and de Tocqueville’s America—a land of participative, bottom-up democracy—survives in only a handful of places.
> Remember, too, that it takes a supermajority to amend the Constitution, so for immigrant culture to have a serious impact on the USA itself would take generations, to the extent it ever does.
If legal documents could change people, then Iraq and Afghanistan would be flourishing democracies today.
It’s blindingly obvious that immigration changed the U.S. without rewriting the constitution. Have you been to Oregon and New Jersey? Which place is populated by British settlers with the means to travel thousands of miles across the country, but the desire to get away from civilization? Which one is populated by impoverished immigrants from southern Italy, and lots of recent Indian immigrants? Impossible to tell!
Which city was built by Mormons? Salt Lake, which is clean, orderly, and full of young moms pushing strollers? Or is it Newark? Why do my German au pairs all like Chicago and think New York is intolerably dirty? Why were the first two places in the world to legalize gay marriage (Massachusetts and the Netherlands) both historically Calvinist? These are imponderables!
> I never suggested that immigration should be entirely unregulated and that people and cultures are fungible.
Then why did you flip out at my hypothetical about 200 million Bangladeshis? If you concede regulation is necessary and cultures aren’t fungible, then you need some cogent view of how different cultures are (including the cultures of people who are immigrating today versus in the past), how sticky those cultures are, how pressure to assimilate today is a lot less than in the past, the degree to which European immigrants actually did or did not fully assimilate, etc.
These questions, however, are very difficult to answer, and most pro-immigrationists haven’t thought about them and are uncomfortable thinking about them. But you can’t have a cogent view of immigration without thinking about and reaching these issues.
> Racists and fearmongerers are evil, even those who hate their own kind.
“Racism” is if you assume I eat curry most nights because I’m Bangladeshi. Assuming that most Bangladeshis in Bangladesh eat curry most nights is a (correct) factual observation. And assuming most first generation Bangladeshi immigrants eat curry most nights is a plausible inference (that happens to be true).
It goes without saying that food preferences aren’t the only ways in which Bangladeshis differ. Assuming that those differences are only superficial is an unfounded assumption—one that happens to be false. In fact, everything from social trust to savings behaviors are transmitted culturally and sticky in immigrants: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...
None of these observations are “racism.” They’re simply observations about groups, which can be reliable because individuals average out leaving aggregate characteristics for groups as wholes.
We’re done.
Religion is likely to stay for longer, and will change to become more like average US culture slower. For example, I don't know if and when a mild American version of Islam will develop which is more adapted to live in harmony with other cultures found in the US.
Putting that aside for the moment, the argument rayiner made, and that you appear to be supporting, is that if you bring too many foreigners into a country, it will change the cultural makeup of that country. It's an argument that seeks to exploit people's fears. It's not a new argument, and it's a largely discredited one. People who make this argument have to anticipate at least the following questions and provide some very difficult answers to them:
1. What exactly is American culture?
2. Is American culture homogeneous? If not, how do you know where immigration will disrupt existing culture, and where it won't?
3. How will you know when American culture is disrupted because of immigrants as opposed to intrinsic forces?
4. How much immigration is too much? How do you know?
5. Which immigrants do you believe are OK to permit into the country, in what numbers, and where?
6. For any potential individual immigrant, how do you know this immigrant will or won't assimilate?
7. How long should an immigrant be given to assimilate? What will assimilation look like for them? What does the bar for "good enough" assimilation look like?
8. Why isn't conformance to our laws sufficient for an immigrant to be accepted?
9. Should new immigrants be Judeo-Christian? If so, how do you square that with the First Amendment's freedom-of-exercise clause? What about all the Muslims already in the USA? Have they adversely impacted America? If so, how?
10. How do you think about the difference between a Black person already in the USA (see question 2) and a new African immigrant?
11. Do the impacts of immigration--particularly of Africans--manifest differently in the Americas than they do in other countries, say, in the UK? If so, why?
12. What about native-born Americans who don't conform to whatever American culture is (see question 1)? Should we eject them?
When I ask people these questions, they invariably end up falling all over themselves. People don't think about immigration rationally; they fall back to primitive "in-group" and "out-group" thinking and engage in "otherism." Sometimes it's religious hatred; sometimes it's racial hatred; other times it's class hatred. I encourage anyone who believes that immigration causes problems figure out for themselves the answers to the above questions and how they would craft a policy that serves everyone better, and not one that just suits their own prejudices.
Nevertheless, modern immigration doesn't change a place that dramatically and for the worse, especially when it's controlled. If you read your history, you'd know that every wave of immigrants to this country has been met with fear, contempt, and opposition (including my family's, as starving Jews escaping the Third Reich). Yet, in the long term, the feared outcomes--similar to the ones you describe--never came to pass. America doesn't look like Italy. It doesn't look like Ireland. It doesn't look like Israel. It doesn't look like Mexico. It doesn't look like Vietnam. It doesn't look like India. Maybe certain neighborhoods do for a while, but that's actually one of the nice things about America: that you can go spend some time and enjoy the fruits of a different culture without leaving home. Yet they're still subject to American laws, regulations, and supervision.
And immigrants don't get to vote, so they don't have much political influence for a long while, even locally. Remember, too, that it takes a supermajority to amend the Constitution, so for immigrant culture to have a serious impact on the USA itself would take generations, to the extent it ever does.
I never suggested that immigration should be entirely unregulated and that people and cultures are fungible. That's a straw man you created. And the fact that you are assuming that's the situation people want and the inevitable outcome that will result reveals who you are, and yeah, I'm going to fucking moralize on it. Racists and fearmongerers are evil, even those who hate their own kind. Your own argument supposes that morals are a part of transplantable culture, and let me tell you: Racism, fear, absolutism, and contempt for outsiders are not American values. Perhaps you need to work better on assimilation, yourself.