Comment by pohl
9 hours ago
You’re understating it by only mentioning Silicon Valley. I’ve worked with lots of great people from all over the world who brought their talents and education here to be productive in our economy, and I’ve never stepped one foot in Silicon Valley. We’ve become an embarrassment.
Being “productive in our economy” shouldn’t be the test. People are hardworking and productive all over the world. People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh work really fucking hard. That’s not what makes America different from Bangladesh.
The test should be, if we put the immigrants on an empty plain, could they recreate Iowa or Massachusetts? I.e. a bottom-up democracy characterized by self-government, rule of law, weak extended family ties and strong civic institutions. Because if they couldn’t recreate those things they can’t maintain America. Instead, what’ll happen (and is happening) will be a slow reversion to the global mean.
As we have seen time and time again with democracy experiments in the third world, these things are rare innovations and can’t be conveyed to other cultures just by writing government structures and laws down on paper. The corollary to that is that there is no guarantee we can perpetuate these things in America against immigration just because they’re written down on paper.
A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test. The Amish have very strong extended family ties, and I think Pennsylvania would lose a lot of its culture if the Amish disappeared or assimilated.
Do you have any examples of immigrant groups establishing or asking control of communities in the US without self-government, rule of law, or strong civic institutions?
You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population.
> A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test
Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.
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