lymanstone

11 anni fadiscuss

Even most postmodern industries are geographically clustered, and regional evidence within the US suggests economic prosperity is not getting more even, ergo, migration is likely to continue. Globally, migration is likely to accelerate in the near term. For my forecasts of future immigration, see here: https://medium.com/migration-issues/a-prophecy-of-immigratio...

lymanstone

11 anni fadiscuss

As I said, I doubt anyone thinks it's a reasonable number. But I put it out there because advocates of immigration need to be aware that EVEN THEY probably prefer tighter immigration than we had in the 19th century. I don't think there's any political constituency for 19th-century levels of open-ness. I mean, I favor much higher immigration, but even I'd balk at that, regardless of origin.

lymanstone

11 anni fadiscuss

Also, German religious leaders tended to promote integration more than Irish religious leaders. Irish Catholics tended to be highly conservative, and were also viewed (rightly or wrongly isn't totally clear) as sympathetic to the South and slavery up until the Civil War, when they fought for the Union of course, but also led draft riots in many cities.

lymanstone

11 anni fadiscuss

To the best of my knowledge, this is not true: the US was open from 1800 until Chinese exclusion in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the 1860s actually had laws to encourage even MORE immigration. See here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immi...

lymanstone

11 anni fadiscuss

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.