[golergka]

But this kind of reading is less relevant, because it has more factors involved than mere immigration dynamics. Before immigration, Germans, English, French and Irish lived alongside together for centuries, with similar religions and culture, and a lot of shared cultural baggage.

Immigrants speaking arabic don't share this characteristics. For better or worse, they come from a different culture, different religion, with different ways of living and values.

Some people simplify these facts to cry gibberish about "brown-skinned terrorists". These people, of course, are racist idiots. But the fact that some idiots blow the facts out of proportion and create an idiotic hysteria out of it doesn't mean that we should ignore the underlying truth. "Different culture" doesn't necessary mean bad things; there's a lot of beautiful things that western civilization has to learn from muslim culture. But some aspects of this culture are alarming, to say the least.

[tryitnow]

Hmmmm. How many immigrants are Muslim? My guess would be it's quite small.

I thought most immigrants are Spanish-speaking - and they do have a lot in common with the current US. Indeed, in many places (e.g. California) Spanish names of towns and streets still predominate.

I think the Muslim concern may be more relevant in Europe, which has closer proximity to the Mid-East and has little experience with integrating diverse immigrant communities.

[dragonwriter]

Spanish town and street names in California don't come from immigration so much as from the fact that Alta California was part of Mexico before it was part of the US.

Its true that there are lots of Spanish speaking immigrants, and its true that more generous quotas would likely increase that more than anything else, but that's not all that closely connected to California city and street names.

[golergka]

> the truth is, large swathes of the United States actually would be “speaking Arabic” (or Chinese or Indian languages)

This is the line in grandparent comment I was referring to. I think it would be same to assume that Chinese and Indian culture — the actual culture, not westernized and modernized "buddhism" and curry — is just as distant from Western culture as Muslim culture.

[lymanstone]

Author here: I appreciate your comments!

A few notes:

Muslims make up somewhere between 4% and 12% of all legal immigrants. When you include illegal inflows, falls to between 2% and 9%. I derive these estimates based on country-of-origin data for legal permanent residents, so there's a wide error band, as we don't know exactly how many from a given country are actually of a specific religion.

I'd also note that I focused on Arabic due to current controversies--- but Chinese or Indian languages are of course way more important. These groups are a large and growing share of immigrants. Just didn't seem germane to focus on them.

Regarding German and Gaelic groups today, yes, there are some, but people routinely speaking non-English, European languages other than Spanish are probably a smaller share than in the past wave of immigrants. Don't know for sure though.

Regarding integration: no, Germans and Irish were NOT easier to integrate. That's nonsense. Intra-European animosity was intense and real, far more intense than what modern Americans feel towards Muslims. Suspicion of Catholics puts current suspicion of Islam to shame. The idea that Europeans were easier to integrate is, in my opinion, a hindsight bias.