[Red_Tarsius]

Can you point to any place where integration between widly different cultures worked on the long term? One place where mass immigration didn't result in the erosion of social trust, safety concerns and political divide through ethnic lines?

[thegrim33]

It's pretty interesting, if you read through the Federalist papers, where they were discussing how to set up the US states/government, they were seriously debating and worried about whether a state full of people from England could coexist next to a state full of people from France. They were seriously worried that even people that similar, from almost the same place and culture, would eventually fracture on their differences and go to war with each other. What a world we live in today in comparison.

[benterix]

Except that was an academic discussion and eventually there were no problems between people of English and French descent, whereas what we're dealing with now is a very real issue and I don't think the so-called cultural differences are the main problem here.

[red-iron-pine]

> English and French descent

> descent

30 years after showing up most of them were speaking English and generally living in roughly the same culture (be it Catholic or Protestant) with roughly similar expectations. As opposed to Muslim, East Asian, Aztec, etc.

Like my people were French huguenots (protestants) and rapidly turned into any other VA tobacco farmers

[dsq]

The US was always the melting pot model, where immigrants assimilated into the general American culture. The second generation spoke 'Merican just like the locals. Italians, Germans, Poles, all became standard USians.

[southernplaces7]

And it continues to this very day. Your average latino American or Asian american just about can't assimilate quickly enough most of the time, and within one generation most fully identify as Americans without rejecting the fundamentals of their origin culture. One can wish and wash about racism in U.S. society in many ways but compared to many countries, the country is remarkably effective at assimilating people from extremely diverse places and making them feel like they belong to its society. Canada does a decent job of it too but I've never quite seem any country pull it off as well as the U.S., maybe because it has such a specifically charismatic cultural image from decades of overwhelmingly, globally popular cinema, pop culture and etc.

[twelve40]

well, arguably the USofA seems to be doing a relatively decent job managing a multitude of cultures over a few centuries... given that at some point, almost everyone was an immigrant (after a number of violent events removed almost all of the locals)

[thegrim33]

The US was over 80% white, often over 90% white, for the vast majority of its existence [0]. It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

[dsq]

Italians, Jews and even Irish were not considered 'white', which was reserved for descendants of British immigrants, due to the general racial theories that dominated the pre-WW2 era.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/colum...

[jstarfish]

> It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.

It was relatively unified because blacks were subjugated until 1968, despite the bloodiest civil war in history liberating them from slavery 100 years before that. Where are you coming from with this?

Diversity isn't a problem in itself; we just have no singular culture for everyone to assimilate into so we trend towards chaos. "When in Rome" has never applied here.

[twelve40]

chaos is an exaggeration. Somalia is chaos, here it's mostly first-world problems and a massive success compared to the real chaos.

[defrost]

Sure: https://www.sbs.com.au/voices/creative/the-karen-road-to-nhi...

and there are other examples.

[go8]

Mumbai. But you need major sustained growth, gigantic slums and mafias to keep the peace.

[fakedang]

You sure about that? The Shiv Sena would like to disagree, as well as the Marwari-only colonies.

[mensetmanusman]

There are no functioning cultures by some definitions.

[haroldp]

The United States. Singapore.

[Gud]

These are terrible examples. I absolutely don't want Sweden to turn into either those countries. Extreme class divide in the 1st case, massive judicial injustice, plus the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s... And Singapore is an extremely authoritarian country.

Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible. Singapore has invited skilled labor from all over the world.

If 1 million Polish or 1 million Portuguese had migrated to Sweden over the last 20 years, I doubt we would be having such problems.

[haroldp]

He asked if there were countries, "where integration between widly[sic] different cultures worked on the long term," and I answered that there were. And it was easy as there are many such examples. This was not a claim that Singapore was superior in every way to Sweden. Merely that multi-cultural countries can be stable and successful. You don't want to live in Singapore, and that's fine, but you all have to move your goalposts away from, "multiculturalism doesn't work," because it absolutely can work.

> the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s

The US and Sweden both had a rough 1970s, and both bounced back pretty well.

> Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible.

The US accepts about a million new immigrants every year, give or take, and has forever. The accents have changed somewhat over my lifetime time but almost all of them have been from countries that are poor and experiencing very bad things. It is a core strength of America that we collect people from all over, quickly turn them into Americans, and borrow the best things about where they came from, and call them our own. Some of my ancestors emigrated to America from Sweden, and I will say that I am very glad that they did for the economic opportunities they found here and because I didn't have to grow up in a monoculture.

[Gud]

Although I agree with your general point, that multi cultural societies can work. But those countries are hardly good examples.

A better example would be Switzerland (where I currently reside).

[southernplaces7]

>Extreme class divide in the 1st case

Please. Media hysterics aside, the U.S. is much better than many, many countries on class divide, and incredibly good at turning immigrants from an incredibly broad range of societies into Americans very peacefully with their full, willfull personal involvement. It manages to do this without even forcing integration or making most people feel ashamed of their origins. It's why there are huge ethnic communities spreading around the country to this day despite their children integrating with the essentials of U.S. society.

So much of the claims against the U.S. for the above seem to be based on a deluded idea of how it works in practice with minimal perspective allowed. Compared to most of the world's other big countries and so many smaller ones, the U.S. is incredibly effective at class mobility, social mobility and integrating immigrants peacefully while still allowing vast numbers of them in per year to this day. I don't see Russia or China welcoming one million immigrants per year and peacefully turning them into their own people in all but ethnic origin and underlying pride in cultural roots.

Even western Europe, for all its liberal platitudes, is rife with hardened underlying racism and ethnic social balkanization to a degree that would give even deep red state Americans a run for their money, it just hides it more smoothly (usually).

[Gud]

I would much rather grow up in a poor family in western Europe than anywhere else in the world.

All your arguments are related to migration. I agree there is a lot of racism in Europe. There is a lot of racism everywhere(yes, even in the US).

I am talking about social mobility. Things such as health care, education and the justice system works much, much better for the poor in Europe. Obviously YMMV. Some countries are more backwards than others, France and the UK especially(according to my observations).

While in the US you have to pay tens of thousands of to hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a good university, in most of Europe all you need are good grades from high school(or equivalent).

Similarly, good health care is accessible to everyone, while in the US it can absolutely bankrupt you, even for the middle class.

Obviously both Europe and the USA are both diverse places. You can't really compare Switzerland to Romania. You can't really compare New York to Georgia.

[defrost]

> these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures

Sweden's had quite the spread from backwards nations to reach that 1 million (2010 - 2020 inclusive):

* Poland 47,940

* Somalia 46,044

* Germany 26,945

* Finland 26,521

* Denmark 21,792

* United Kingdom 21,285

* Norway 21,265

* United States 19,378

etc. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Contempo... )

With the largest number, 177,154 from Syria - more wartorn and shredded by decades of totalitarian dictatorship than intrinsically 'backwards'.