[inglor_cz]

Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate. But that is a fairly non-consequential observation, at least when observed in 2021, and the mechanism cannot be easily carried over to modern world.

For starters, there is a lot more of us humans nowadays. Instant communication means that even if you move thousands of miles away from your country, you are still fed a steady information diet about all the outrage back home, so you cannot really let go of the place you moved away from.

And some culture clashes are very real. The later remnant of the Roman empire (Byzantium) fought against the Islamic world for centuries and finally fell to the Turks. They did not find a way to assimilate the newcomers. The religious barrier was too high. To be fair, they had a similar problem with Catholic Europeans, the Sack of Constantinople wasn't perpetrated by anyone else than fellow Christians.

In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.

[cabalamat]

> Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate

I don't think it's historically accurate to describe the Germanic peoples who conquered the Western Roman Empire as not willing to assimilate, given that they all learned Latin (and indeed their descendants in Italy, France and Spain speak languages descended from Latin to this day) and converted to Christianity. They clearly were prepared to take up Roman ways/culture.

[hkt]

> In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.

Like most sweeping generalisations, this is wrong. Whether groups live in parallel is determined community by community, not by nationality. I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.

[cabalamat]

> I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them.

It's not all obvious to me that:

(1) some Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in the UK faced more racism than other Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in other parts of the UK,

and (2) that was the cause of the different amounts of integration between those communities.

Do you have any data to back up this contention?

[inglor_cz]

Not the OP, just a comment.

My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.

The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.

[TMWNN]

>My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.

I don't think this is hypocritical; just normal human behavior.

Newcomers are always the "other", and treated as such. Over time, as the "in group" discovers that if the "out group" displays behavior that makes for good customers and employees, and that there are financial benefits (increased sales, being able to hire new staff at a lower rate than otherwise) the "out group" becomes integrated with the "in group".

>The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.

Yes, but thankfully such behavior is (very) rare. Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe for centuries but conditions had gradually improved everywhere. When fascism/authoritarianism became a thing in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, most regimes at worst maintained the existing casual anti-Semitism. Hitlerian genocidal anti-Semitism was very much an aberration, not seen in Hungary, pre-Anschluss Austria, Poland, or Italy. Mussolini's Italy had many Jewish supporters and leaders; it reluctantly implemented anti-Jewish racial laws just before the war began, after it became clear that Germany was now the more powerful Axis power.

More to the point, the integration can only occur when the "out group" behaves in ways that the "in group" accepts. In the US and Western Europe such integration happened or is happening with Jews, Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Asians, South non-Muslim Asians, and Latinos. This has not happened with blacks and Muslims.

[selimthegrim]

What's your proof that Muslims in the US are resisting integration?

[TMWNN]

>What's your proof that Muslims in the US are resisting integration?

The San Bernardino, Orlando, and Boston Marathon attacks immediately comes to mind, among others. (I'm not sure what's worse about the San Bernardino attack, that a woman was involved or that her husband was American-born.)

But the US is still better off than Western Europe. In Britain, you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:

* Indian Hindus

* Indian Sikhs

* Indian and Pakistani Muslims

Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.

Beyond the obvious big French attacks (whether Nice truck, Bataclan, or Charlie Hebdo), the Islam-terrorism connection (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_terrorism>) is quite firm. According to a Muslim MP, twice as many British Muslims joined ISIS as the British armed forces (<https://www.newsweek.com/twice-many-british-muslims-fighting...>), despite the much lower pay and much greater difficulty of traveling to and enlisting.

The list of Islamic terrorist attacks (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...>) is so long that one's eyes and mind become numb after a while. One thrilling 12-day period in July 2016 had four Islamist attacks in Western Europe (Nice truck attack, Germany train attack, Germany suicide bombing, France priest attack)! 2017 saw the *third* London incident involving civilians attacked on a bridge!

And before you say "they're not real Muslims", as The Atlantic explained in detail (<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isi...>), ISIS was and is ISIS because its members and leaders are sincere in their fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. They are telling the truth when they call themselves devout Muslims.

[TMWNN]

>What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.

I disagree. In Britain you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:

* Indian Hindus

* Indian Sikhs

* Indian and Pakistani Muslims

Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.

Indian Sikhs and Hindus are willing to assimilate. Indian and Pakistani Muslims, far less so.

[inglor_cz]

"What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem."

It does not seem as obvious to me. This theory seems to have too many outliers.

At least here in Central Europe, racism/anti-semitism against visible minorities tended to be very strong. Historically, Jews were treated horribly, and in the more recent history, Vietnamese also. Growing up in the 1990s, there was a lot of shockingly casual racism against them.

Looking across the pond, Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during WWII. The only worse level of racism is probably genocide.

In all these cases, the communities are now very well integrated, though the memories of really bad treatment aren't that distant.

[wffurr]

Did you read the article at all?

[inglor_cz]

Yes, yesterday, actually. I love the blog, though I do not always agree with everything. For example, this particular text could have remarked that Christianity turned out to be notably less assimilable and co-optable than many other identities and actually managed to subvert the empire instead of being absorbed to the mega-mix.

[labster]

No, it could not have made that point, because Christianity did not happen during the Roman Republic. It was not about the empire at all, so why would it make any points about the empire?

[inglor_cz]

Because it was a successor state with a rather similar philosophy when it came to conquering tribes and nations around?