Different Immigrants

I should be getting home today.

I missed this essay when it came out in 2023. Philippe Lemoine's The Mirage of America's Special Sauce Theory. He has heard for years that America must be doing something right in assimilating immigrants (and hence Europe must be doing something wrong) because immigrants to America have better incomes, less crime, and go on to get more education than those in Europe. He points out that other than those from Mexico, immigrants to the US have much more education than those to Europe. Americans have long lumped the lack of education of the incoming Mexicans with the whole package, using that to claim that overall, immigrants to Europe and the US are an apples-to-apples comparison. He calls it the Argument Ad Mexicanos, which is both accurate and clever.  

I recognised it immediately, as I have used it myself.  It is part of my controversial claim that America is much less racist than the countries which criticise it. We actually have different races, unlike most of our critics, and as those countries start to receive people of different races, they have not done well with them. Because our native population was here well before the white population and the black population has been here as long, it isn't quite the same as the immigration discussion. Still, it overlaps because of what Europe is experiencing now.  The rest of the world seldom even makes it into any discussion of races. They don't have them.

Anyway, back to the original topic.  I have believed the America's Special Sauce theory, without thinking very hard about what was behind it. I generalised that we bring in a similar percentage of people with low education overall, so the comparison is fair. Lemoine takes a more granular approach, and the results are striking. Please note that he thinks the special sauce theory might have a lot of truth in it, and grants that arguendo. He just doesn't think it rests on a firm foundation, and is quite obviously inadequate in some ways.

 The problem with this argument is that it implicitly rests on the assumption that, once you control for education and perhaps a handful of other socio-economic variables, different ethnic groups are just as easy or hard to integrate, but nobody who is even remotely familiar with the data can find that assumption plausible. Indeed, on just about every metric that is relevant to how well-integrated immigrants are, a huge amount of variation remains associated with the country of origin even when you control for education. For instance, even if you look only at non-college educated immigrants in the US and in addition control for age and sex, the average personal income still varies wildly depending on the country of origin.

America greatly reduced the number of immigrants it took in about 100 years ago, and the greater proportion of what it took in the hundred years before that was European. That demographic balance persisted for forty years but changed in the 60s. In our lifetimes the bulk of immigration has come from Mexico, and only recently did that shift to Latin America in general, then to a more world-wide pattern. Through that prism, look at the bars of the chart above again. Mentally eliminate Mexico altogether (which is not far from the truth, as the percentage of population that immigrated from Mexico flatlined fifteen years ago) from the right-hand side. Now the bars show that Europe has received a remarkably less-educated set of immigrants from different places than America has.

Lemoine spends a good deal of the rest of the essay describing the ways in which immigrants from some areas are different, and frankly, more difficult to integrate. (How Sweden's Multicultural Dream Went Fatally Wrong.) We uneasily know this here.  Somalis have proved much more difficult than Nigerians, for example.