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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

> History and data from various European nations suggest that some immigrant groups aren't able to integrate with the host society after multiple generations, and remain ghettoized with low employment and high crime rates (vastly higher, for certain categories of crime).

I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the United States, it took numerous generations of German-Americans to fully integrate into society, with towns in Wisconsin speaking a dialect of German well into the 1940s. Despite this lack of cultural integration, these cities experienced very little crime.

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Different immigrant groups have better or worse outcomes, hence my saying "some immigrant groups". The cultural distance between the English progenitors of the US to the large wave of German immigrants in the 1800s is not as great as, say, that of Turkish immigrants to Germany post-WW2, or Syrian immigrants to contemporary Denmark.

Another way to look at it is that immigrant groups bring parts of their old world with them; German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture and established it in their new country.

You can see this with Italian immigrants to America. I’m in New Jersey right now, and recently was in Wyoming. These are obviously not the same people despite being “white.” They’re more different than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and we fought a war to be separate from each other.

> German-Americans left a high-social-trust, low-crime culture

Did they? I can't speak to the crime rate of the German empire, but a very common reason to immigrate, in addition to availability of farm land, was to avoid the draft (low social trust). The slow rate of assimilation is also a signal that these were not people coming from a "high-social-trust" background.

WWI also forced the issue in a way that hasn't quite applied to other "ethnic" folks in the US. German immigrants, by and large, have been pushed towards forgetting their national culture altogether and assimilating into a newly-manufactured (by early 20th-century Progressives, no less), unified "White" identity.

There was as much (more, even) pressure on the Italians and Irish to do the same.

But, to add to and enforce OP's point, their cultures were a larger schism away and they instead held on and entrenched their identities (to their objective detriment, no matter your moral stance). Meanwhile, Anglo, Franco, German, Dutch, etc cultures all kind of melded into the early "White American" identity; due to the general ease of assimilation.

How much difference is there, really, between various European nationalities? They are all white and Christian, using similar language and script, mostly the difference is in the Christian denomination.

Similar language is a stretch. Sure, European languages have similar roots, if you go enough far back. But the ability to speak your native language with a fellow European of another nationality, and have a fluent conversation, is quite limited.

About 1000x more than the difference between US states

I guess you could ask the same question of the middle eastern countries. Pretty reductive perspective, no?

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