Aside from racism. I mean economically/socially, what issues does too much immigration cause?
America is a nation of immigrants so I don’t really understand this argument. Cultures don’t really integrate that way, plus assimilation is a generational thing.
A 2018 study in the American Sociological Review found that within racial groups, most immigrants to the United States had fully assimilated within a span of 20 years. Immigrants arriving in the United States after 1994 assimilate more rapidly than immigrants who arrived in previous periods.
Measuring assimilation can be difficult due to “ethnic attrition”, which refers to when descendants of migrants cease to self-identify with the nationality or ethnicity of their ancestors. This means that successful cases of assimilation will be underestimated. Research shows that ethnic attrition is sizable in Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups in the United States.
By taking ethnic attrition into account, the assimilation rate of Hispanics in the United States improves significantly. A 2016 paper challenges the view that cultural differences are necessarily an obstacle to long-run economic performance of migrants. It finds that “first generation migrants seem to be less likely to success the more culturally distant they are, but this effect vanishes as time spent in the US increases”. A 2020 study found that recent immigrants to the United States assimilated at a similar pace as historical immigrants.
The US really is a special case even within just America and really cannot be compared to today’s refugee hotspots like Europe at all. For starters, US culture is very young and mostly made up of invaders and migrants. There is very little native culture still there as it has been assimilated for hundreds of years, mostly by Europeans. On top of that, there have been heavy crackdowns on migrant cultures as well, making it anything but the organically grown culture it often claims to be. And as such I think it is a bad example of how unchecked mass migration can work because it didn’t work for the natives and it didn’t happen for the modern US. It does show that strong migration can lead to great success, though it’s still far less densely populated than Europe even now so a direct comparison is still difficult.
The economic benefits of immigration also applies to European countries, despite the racist sentiments many Europeans have towards immigrants. Additionally, the West’s destabilization of the Global South, from war and climate change, has caused the increase in people seeking asylum and immigration.
The crackdowns on migrants and the deliberate two-tier immigration system is certainly a problem, and is deliberate in order to coerce illegal immigrants into very low paying jobs with no workers rights under the threat of deportation.
Immigration was not the cause of the genocide of the Native Americans, that was due to Settler Colonialism and Dehumanization. That is not like today. Immigrants are not settler colonialist like the early Americans. Additionally, it is the US citizens who are dehumanizing Immigrants, not the other way around. Immigrants are a positive, the only negative is the reactionary violence by racist far-right domestic terrorists.
You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.
(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)
Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.
