Every receiving nation draws a line between the culture it expects newcomers to adopt and the identity it permits them to keep, and the line moves depending on who is crossing it.
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The Irish would never assimilate — too Catholic, too clannish. Signs went up: No Irish Need Apply. Within two generations, an Irish Catholic sat in the Oval Office. The Italians — too southern, their food smelled wrong. Within two generations, Italian cuisine was American cuisine. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was premised on racial incapability. Today, Asian Americans are the highest-earning demographic. The demand to assimilate is always temporary and always dishonest.
Toronto is the most ethnically diverse city on earth — over half its population born outside Canada — and it functions. Crime below the American average. Democratic participation above it. The catastrophe the predict has not arrived in fifty-three years.
France demanded assimilation with the full force of republican universalism. Three generations in, its Muslim population is more segregated and more alienated than the Muslim populations of countries that asked less. The banlieues are not a failure of multiculturalism. They are a failure of assimilationism.
The want immigrants to assimilate into a culture that is itself the product of people who refused to assimilate. Jazz is African. Pizza is Italian. The Constitution's architecture is French and Scottish. American expats in Costa Rica maintain their culture abroad and nobody questions it. When a Somali family does the same in Minneapolis, it's a threat. The variable isn't behavior. It's who has the power to define which culture counts as default. The are our natural allies on the legal question. We want the state to go further — funding heritage programs and reflecting the population it serves.
Where we concede ground: Forced marriage and honor violence exist in communities we've defended, and criminal law alone is insufficient.
What would change our mind: Second-generation immigrants in multicultural countries showing declining civic participation over two decades.
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AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.