Dec 31, 2023·edited Dec 31, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
I've lived for many years in two cities where I encountered Hispanic immigrants. Both experiences cemented my great respect for immigrants.
In the 70s in New York City, I worked with Dominican kitchen help in my job as a waitress. Most of the time I was the only person in the restaurant who could interact with the kitchen help in Spanish. I also interacted with many Spanish speaking immigrants during my five years as a receptionist. My impression was that they were strangers in a strange land struggling hard to figure things out.
When I arrived in Houston, the situation was very different. Here, the border with Mexico has been porous for centuries. There are Tejanos in Texas whose ancestors lived here for centuries before Esteban Austin (that's Steven to you) Arrived on the scene. Thus, there is a whole matrix of Hispanic culture into which new arrivals fit seamlessly. They have all kinds of formal and informal support systems to facilitate their integration into the economy whether their participation is strictly legal or not. They don't have to depend on a woman with one year of college Spanish to act as their interpreter, as the New York immigrants did when I was a receptionist.
I’m thinking of writing an article about this (have a draft saved, just need to flesh it out adequately) about how the usual suspects (guilt ridden whites + various “POC” hoping for their acceptance and aggrieved blacks, both fixated on “oppression”) are trying to replace a dying white monoculture with not an emerging multicultural society but a system of ethnic competition mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions. I’d rather we not end up with a Lebanon/Fiji style conflict, but if we do I’ll ensure my “people” get theirs.
My hope was that Asian and Hispanic immigrants would be a large enough bloc to disrupt the racial pathologies on both sides - on the right, a yearning for a homogenous white monoculture and on the left the melding of white guilt and black grievance demanding ever more special privileges. This article has given me some pause. We may still avoid replacing a monoculture with racial composition and moving to true multiculturalism, but I’m not sure how.
The Census Bureau has an awful lot to answer for. They made long-term forecasts of the racial composition of the country, based on a frankly essentialist one-drop idea that anyone who is not entirely non-Hispanic white is non-white.
Breathless predictions of a majority-minority future ensued, and we got the "emerging Democratic majority" / "rising American electorate" / demographics-is-destiny strategy from the left, and race panic from the right. It's unprovable either way, but I wonder if we'd have had Trump without this.
All of it over...well, probably nothing. Is "non-Irish white" a category anyone cares about now?
Thank you! (Says the Irish-born-and-raised son of an Irish father from Ireland and an Irish-American mother from Pittsburgh whose favorite college class when I came to the US age 18 was Martin Kilson’s Ethnicity in American Political Culture in Spring 1990.)
My concern is that Democrats are not doing enough to attract an up and coming folks. Being told they are part of a coalition of oppressed minorities must be really off-putting to Hispanics (like being told they must be called "Latinx.")
I hate to sound like a broken record but either Leah Boustan's findings are not plausible, or else I don't understand what the findings are.
Apparently Hispanic kids who grow up working-class don't suffer any disadvantage •at all• to their life prospects. As adults they're as likely to earn above the 50th percentile as below it.
And comparable non-Hispanic white kids suffer •almost• no disadvantage. They're distributed around the 46th percentile as adults.
Is that what she's saying? I'm probably getting this wrong, but how?
Oh! That's because there's a lot of churn, so you get some drag from a minority of people who experience downward mobility from the middle class. Boustan explains it in our interview:
"I should point out that the picture does not look quite as hopeful (but still looks pretty good, to my eyes) if we compare the average child of Mexican parents to the average child of US-born parents. Because the average children of Mexican parents grow up in poorer households, they do start with some disadvantages, so the children of Mexican parents do not completely catch up with the children of US-born parents on average. But, their earnings gap is a lot smaller than what their parents experienced, so the second generation is doing substantially better than the first -- and that's important progress."
I'm sorry, but I still don't get it. Is the 50th / 46th percentile figure the median for the children's adult earnings?
I can see in principle how that might disguise some poor underlying outcomes. (Perhaps just over half of the kids are earning at exactly the 50th percentile, while just under half are earning exactly at the 10th percentile.)
But it seems statistically unlikely that this is what's happening. "Outcomes distributed around the 50th / 46th percentile" sounds to me like "randomly / mostly randomly distributed across all social classes", and that implies "no impact / almost no impact from having a childhood in the 25th percentile". In other words: she's shown that the US has total or near-total social mobility.
This goes so strongly against a reasonable person's priors that I'd want to see the full data sets, not just the medians, before drawing any conclusions at all. Something looks off here.
The key here is that there's a ton of mean reversion in the income distribution. People born at the 25th percentile tend to end up much higher; people born at the 75th percentile tend to end up much lower. This means there's a lot of both upward and downward mobility in America. This means that lifetime income inequality is going to be a lot lower than income inequality at a specific point in time. It's not perfect social mobility, but it is substantial. And for the kids of immigrants, it's greater -- and the upward relative mobility outweighs the downward relative mobility by a lot, because the kids of immigrants tend to catch up with the native born.
I agree that intergenerational mobility is significant but it would surprise me if it were anywhere near 100 percent, in the sense that parents' incomes and adult children's incomes had a correlation of zero.
The finding that children from low-income white and Hispanic families end up with a distribution of adult incomes centered near the 50th percentile doesn't strictly imply that the heritability of social class is close to zero, but it does suggest it pretty strongly. And that would be an astonishing conclusion.
So you'd want to look at the data in detail to see if the surprising medians are some sort of statistical artifact, or if in fact the data shows that class status is mostly not inherited. In either case it might raise some doubts about the reliability of the data itself... has Dr. Boustan made it publicly available, by the way?
It’s merely saying that the children of immigrants catch up with the median - which isn’t that spectacular a claim. Who is left behind? Presumably some black Americans are stuck in inter generational poverty and new immigrants fill a lot of the lower income slots.
But net intergenerational mobility is always zero.
If poor immigrants are moving dramatically upward and poor whites are •also• moving dramatically upward, some other group must be falling down the ladder to an equal degree. Which group is that?
There is strong mean reversion in income statistics, but isn’t wealth much different? The top 2-5% inherit enough that median workers will never catch up and even a doctor or successful lawyer would have to save a huge chunk of income to catch up.
I recommend The Myth of Income Inequality, for a different data source on income vs. parental income. It's mostly just about income (not race). It does find that income mobility is high, but as I recall more like 35-40% make 2-quintile moves. (They mostly measure by quintile, so it's a bit different than analyzing top and bottom half, but in a way I find informative)
“ echoes the pattern of the Irish, who were initially stereotyped as criminals, but who joined police forces in large numbers (this is probably where the term “paddy wagon” comes from). ”
I’ll look it up, but I always thought this was a slur about the vehicle used for picking up the drunk and disorderly, so the opposite of your putative word origin.
Something I've thought about is whether there's a kind of 'natural' majority number that tends to sort itself into an in-group by just changing the definitions. Say it's 60%, if the old categories are white, hispanic, black, etc., and whites dip below 60%, society just naturally redefines the groups, maybe using new words, maybe not. 'Hispanic' becomes subsumed into the 'white' group. The emergence of 'Judeo-Christian' may belong here somewhere, a kind of natural equilibrium societies tend to gravitate toward.
Conversely, maybe there needs to be some sort of minority outgroup for this to work. In Europe, this is taken by Muslim and African immigrants. But if they hadn't come, would those societies see themselves as more homogenous, or would say Eastern Europeans fill that role the same way other immigrants do right now. And if there really were no immigration to Germany, would it be Swabians, or Bavarians, or Low Germans?
Not sure this is a hard and fast rule, or if it's even accurate, but it's interesting to think about how it has played out in different contexts. Have there been any studies on this?
With respect to the political implications, it's important to remember that Tammany Hall was an Irish Catholic powerhouse in Democratic politics for more than a century and a half.
It’s strange and confusing how the category of Hispanic/Latino is defined. By the name it implies a linguistic group (anyone speaking Spanish or Portuguese) but then excludes anyone from Europe (and possibly Argentina), but includes descendants of those who met the definition but now only speak English. Or you can define it regionally, but that is also hard: anyone from South or Central America or Mexico or the Caribbean, but excluding Jamaicans, Haitians, or Guyanaians, but including only some North Americans with indiindigenous ancestors. Then the wokesters need to make it fit with their all-important racial heirarchy, and it breaks down so then we need to add non-Hispanic whites (but for some reason not non-Hispanic blacks, or non-Hispanic Asians like Alberto Fujimori and Brazilian-Japanese). With such a vague category, it is difficult to say what common experiences or economic trends will be.
Not sure I would call Texas "deep red" any more - at the last presidential election it was only 5% redder than the average state. But given all the data you've presented in this blog, the electoral trend there must be down to something other than the Hispanic population - do you know know it might be?
Suburbs turning bluer. That’s what’s happening in AZ, NM and NV. Also, Noah has written a lot about how quickly Texas is growing, but a lot of that growth seems to be in relatively blue suburbs and cities, which is more or less what you’d expect if blue-staters are emigrating for economic reasons.
The comparison to the Irish is an excellent analogy. But I have one minor quibble, on the reference you made to the Judis-Texeira book on "The Emerging Democratic Majority". When John and Ruy wrote the book on how the country's changing demographics could help the Dems, they both assumed that there would be a floor in support for Democrats among the white working class, ie the Dems would not write them off or call them deplorables. The Dems would get a minority of the WWC but big enough so white professionals and growing minorities, such as Hispanics could put them over 50 percent.
BUT, if the white working class (WWC) share of the Dem vote falls too low, the strategy of just allowing a huge increase in immigration set forth doesn’t work, according to John & Ruy.
Somehow this got garbled in the Dem intelligentsia into the message that there is already a nonwhite majority nationwide (there won’t be until 2050 and then only if you count self described white Hispanics as nonwhites, which evidence suggests that even Hispanics don't do). The other view is that the Dems just need to mobilize their base and wait for the high school educated white voters to die off. But that’s a 50 or 100 year strategy, at best (and it’s doubtful that we will even have our present racial categories in the remote future).
As an American immigrant from Europe, I put a lot of blame on the lack of birthright citizenship in Europe. Sweden (where I am from) is full of themselves for their openness and equality, but they still speak of “third-generation immigrants”. Under European law, my US-born children and grandchildren would have more legal affinity to Sweden than to the US. No wonder immigrants have a hard time assimilating in Europe.
I think it's more appearances and culture than birthright citizenship policy.
When did the myth that Japan is 99% Japanese start? That would be the speed that the sizable Korean and Chinese minority left after WW2 integrated to the point that people forgot they exist, which happened under not only a lack of birthright citizenship, but patrilineal citizenship.
I've heard that Japan is 99% Japanese for as long as I can remember, so integration without birthright citizenship happened in most a few decades at most even if it left a small faction of hard core anti-integrators who protest efforts to expand citizenship.
And yet despite birthright citizenship, there's tons of Asian Americans who trace their roots back to the railroad labor days, who still complain about lack of integration.
> When did the myth that Japan is 99% Japanese start?
Besides the integration of other Asians, this also comes from people misreading "% who are Japanese citizens" as "% who are ethnically Japanese". The government doesn't track ethnicity so there are no official numbers for it.
If Koreans and Chinese didn't fully integrate, then it should be clearly and blatantly false to anyone with even basic familiarity in Japan. However, Japan being 99% Japanese is a myth peddled by supposedly trustworthy sources.
Is that because the mainstream media have been caught with their pants down pushing fake news unapologetically for decades without any retractions when they are called out on it? Pure, intentional, malicious lying plain and simple? Or is it because Japan being 99% Japanese is somehow more accurate to the situation on the ground than Japan being <90% Japanese?
At least living in Tokyo, I've met Korean/Chinese-Japanese that are not interrogated when they say they are from some part of Japan (and likely more that never bothered to reveal their non-Yamato Japanese heritage to me), while living in the US every Asian-American including myself will often get interrogated for claiming to come from some part of the US.
Your points are all good ones. Also, the dominance of English in the United States facilitates integration, while the multiplicities of languages in Europe works against it.
Anecdotal, but we spent a month each in Spain and Portugal this past year. Encountered various African immigrants, usually out on the streets or plazas trying to sell trinkets and junk to tourists. They all spoke perfect English. I have no idea how their Spanish/Portuguese was.
Isn't the real problem with MENA immigrants not so much with the religion as with the highly kin-centric nature of its society, as exemplified by its high rate of paternal cousin marriage?
I remember reading someone on Twitter who attacked the stigma now attached to the Palestinian keffiyeh, likening it to Scottish tartan, and I replied (they blocked me almost immediately, suggesting I struck a nerve) by pointing out that that analogy was more accurate than they realized, given that tartan is not generally Scottish but specifically Highland, and integrating the Highland clans was a real problem historically for the British state: it contributed to the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and the British state actually banned traditional Highland dress for some time afterwards.
I've lived for many years in two cities where I encountered Hispanic immigrants. Both experiences cemented my great respect for immigrants.
In the 70s in New York City, I worked with Dominican kitchen help in my job as a waitress. Most of the time I was the only person in the restaurant who could interact with the kitchen help in Spanish. I also interacted with many Spanish speaking immigrants during my five years as a receptionist. My impression was that they were strangers in a strange land struggling hard to figure things out.
When I arrived in Houston, the situation was very different. Here, the border with Mexico has been porous for centuries. There are Tejanos in Texas whose ancestors lived here for centuries before Esteban Austin (that's Steven to you) Arrived on the scene. Thus, there is a whole matrix of Hispanic culture into which new arrivals fit seamlessly. They have all kinds of formal and informal support systems to facilitate their integration into the economy whether their participation is strictly legal or not. They don't have to depend on a woman with one year of college Spanish to act as their interpreter, as the New York immigrants did when I was a receptionist.
I’m thinking of writing an article about this (have a draft saved, just need to flesh it out adequately) about how the usual suspects (guilt ridden whites + various “POC” hoping for their acceptance and aggrieved blacks, both fixated on “oppression”) are trying to replace a dying white monoculture with not an emerging multicultural society but a system of ethnic competition mediated through political, economic and cultural institutions. I’d rather we not end up with a Lebanon/Fiji style conflict, but if we do I’ll ensure my “people” get theirs.
My hope was that Asian and Hispanic immigrants would be a large enough bloc to disrupt the racial pathologies on both sides - on the right, a yearning for a homogenous white monoculture and on the left the melding of white guilt and black grievance demanding ever more special privileges. This article has given me some pause. We may still avoid replacing a monoculture with racial composition and moving to true multiculturalism, but I’m not sure how.
One way is exogamy. Hispanics and Asians are just going to be come part of the "white" majority.
Please do write that article.
Words to power!
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/no-salad-bowl-america-is-still-a-melting-pot/ It's been written
The Census Bureau has an awful lot to answer for. They made long-term forecasts of the racial composition of the country, based on a frankly essentialist one-drop idea that anyone who is not entirely non-Hispanic white is non-white.
Breathless predictions of a majority-minority future ensued, and we got the "emerging Democratic majority" / "rising American electorate" / demographics-is-destiny strategy from the left, and race panic from the right. It's unprovable either way, but I wonder if we'd have had Trump without this.
All of it over...well, probably nothing. Is "non-Irish white" a category anyone cares about now?
Thank you! (Says the Irish-born-and-raised son of an Irish father from Ireland and an Irish-American mother from Pittsburgh whose favorite college class when I came to the US age 18 was Martin Kilson’s Ethnicity in American Political Culture in Spring 1990.)
My concern is that Democrats are not doing enough to attract an up and coming folks. Being told they are part of a coalition of oppressed minorities must be really off-putting to Hispanics (like being told they must be called "Latinx.")
I hate to sound like a broken record but either Leah Boustan's findings are not plausible, or else I don't understand what the findings are.
Apparently Hispanic kids who grow up working-class don't suffer any disadvantage •at all• to their life prospects. As adults they're as likely to earn above the 50th percentile as below it.
And comparable non-Hispanic white kids suffer •almost• no disadvantage. They're distributed around the 46th percentile as adults.
Is that what she's saying? I'm probably getting this wrong, but how?
Oh! That's because there's a lot of churn, so you get some drag from a minority of people who experience downward mobility from the middle class. Boustan explains it in our interview:
"I should point out that the picture does not look quite as hopeful (but still looks pretty good, to my eyes) if we compare the average child of Mexican parents to the average child of US-born parents. Because the average children of Mexican parents grow up in poorer households, they do start with some disadvantages, so the children of Mexican parents do not completely catch up with the children of US-born parents on average. But, their earnings gap is a lot smaller than what their parents experienced, so the second generation is doing substantially better than the first -- and that's important progress."
I'm sorry, but I still don't get it. Is the 50th / 46th percentile figure the median for the children's adult earnings?
I can see in principle how that might disguise some poor underlying outcomes. (Perhaps just over half of the kids are earning at exactly the 50th percentile, while just under half are earning exactly at the 10th percentile.)
But it seems statistically unlikely that this is what's happening. "Outcomes distributed around the 50th / 46th percentile" sounds to me like "randomly / mostly randomly distributed across all social classes", and that implies "no impact / almost no impact from having a childhood in the 25th percentile". In other words: she's shown that the US has total or near-total social mobility.
This goes so strongly against a reasonable person's priors that I'd want to see the full data sets, not just the medians, before drawing any conclusions at all. Something looks off here.
The key here is that there's a ton of mean reversion in the income distribution. People born at the 25th percentile tend to end up much higher; people born at the 75th percentile tend to end up much lower. This means there's a lot of both upward and downward mobility in America. This means that lifetime income inequality is going to be a lot lower than income inequality at a specific point in time. It's not perfect social mobility, but it is substantial. And for the kids of immigrants, it's greater -- and the upward relative mobility outweighs the downward relative mobility by a lot, because the kids of immigrants tend to catch up with the native born.
Was that what you were wondering about?
I agree that intergenerational mobility is significant but it would surprise me if it were anywhere near 100 percent, in the sense that parents' incomes and adult children's incomes had a correlation of zero.
The finding that children from low-income white and Hispanic families end up with a distribution of adult incomes centered near the 50th percentile doesn't strictly imply that the heritability of social class is close to zero, but it does suggest it pretty strongly. And that would be an astonishing conclusion.
So you'd want to look at the data in detail to see if the surprising medians are some sort of statistical artifact, or if in fact the data shows that class status is mostly not inherited. In either case it might raise some doubts about the reliability of the data itself... has Dr. Boustan made it publicly available, by the way?
It’s merely saying that the children of immigrants catch up with the median - which isn’t that spectacular a claim. Who is left behind? Presumably some black Americans are stuck in inter generational poverty and new immigrants fill a lot of the lower income slots.
But net intergenerational mobility is always zero.
If poor immigrants are moving dramatically upward and poor whites are •also• moving dramatically upward, some other group must be falling down the ladder to an equal degree. Which group is that?
There is strong mean reversion in income statistics, but isn’t wealth much different? The top 2-5% inherit enough that median workers will never catch up and even a doctor or successful lawyer would have to save a huge chunk of income to catch up.
Just to be clear, because her interview comment makes me uncertain:
The percentile positions are calculated against the entire US population, right? Not for the subgroup in question?
I recommend The Myth of Income Inequality, for a different data source on income vs. parental income. It's mostly just about income (not race). It does find that income mobility is high, but as I recall more like 35-40% make 2-quintile moves. (They mostly measure by quintile, so it's a bit different than analyzing top and bottom half, but in a way I find informative)
“ echoes the pattern of the Irish, who were initially stereotyped as criminals, but who joined police forces in large numbers (this is probably where the term “paddy wagon” comes from). ”
I’ll look it up, but I always thought this was a slur about the vehicle used for picking up the drunk and disorderly, so the opposite of your putative word origin.
Looks like it’s contested. I like the P.D Wagon theory in support of your claim.
Something I've thought about is whether there's a kind of 'natural' majority number that tends to sort itself into an in-group by just changing the definitions. Say it's 60%, if the old categories are white, hispanic, black, etc., and whites dip below 60%, society just naturally redefines the groups, maybe using new words, maybe not. 'Hispanic' becomes subsumed into the 'white' group. The emergence of 'Judeo-Christian' may belong here somewhere, a kind of natural equilibrium societies tend to gravitate toward.
Conversely, maybe there needs to be some sort of minority outgroup for this to work. In Europe, this is taken by Muslim and African immigrants. But if they hadn't come, would those societies see themselves as more homogenous, or would say Eastern Europeans fill that role the same way other immigrants do right now. And if there really were no immigration to Germany, would it be Swabians, or Bavarians, or Low Germans?
Not sure this is a hard and fast rule, or if it's even accurate, but it's interesting to think about how it has played out in different contexts. Have there been any studies on this?
The main cause of Brexit was European immigration, hostility to Ukrainian immigration is growing. So yes.
With respect to the political implications, it's important to remember that Tammany Hall was an Irish Catholic powerhouse in Democratic politics for more than a century and a half.
It’s strange and confusing how the category of Hispanic/Latino is defined. By the name it implies a linguistic group (anyone speaking Spanish or Portuguese) but then excludes anyone from Europe (and possibly Argentina), but includes descendants of those who met the definition but now only speak English. Or you can define it regionally, but that is also hard: anyone from South or Central America or Mexico or the Caribbean, but excluding Jamaicans, Haitians, or Guyanaians, but including only some North Americans with indiindigenous ancestors. Then the wokesters need to make it fit with their all-important racial heirarchy, and it breaks down so then we need to add non-Hispanic whites (but for some reason not non-Hispanic blacks, or non-Hispanic Asians like Alberto Fujimori and Brazilian-Japanese). With such a vague category, it is difficult to say what common experiences or economic trends will be.
Not sure I would call Texas "deep red" any more - at the last presidential election it was only 5% redder than the average state. But given all the data you've presented in this blog, the electoral trend there must be down to something other than the Hispanic population - do you know know it might be?
Suburbs turning bluer. That’s what’s happening in AZ, NM and NV. Also, Noah has written a lot about how quickly Texas is growing, but a lot of that growth seems to be in relatively blue suburbs and cities, which is more or less what you’d expect if blue-staters are emigrating for economic reasons.
Seems like there was a certain rural/urban dynamic in the Irish Catholic fears way back when as well.
The comparison to the Irish is an excellent analogy. But I have one minor quibble, on the reference you made to the Judis-Texeira book on "The Emerging Democratic Majority". When John and Ruy wrote the book on how the country's changing demographics could help the Dems, they both assumed that there would be a floor in support for Democrats among the white working class, ie the Dems would not write them off or call them deplorables. The Dems would get a minority of the WWC but big enough so white professionals and growing minorities, such as Hispanics could put them over 50 percent.
BUT, if the white working class (WWC) share of the Dem vote falls too low, the strategy of just allowing a huge increase in immigration set forth doesn’t work, according to John & Ruy.
Somehow this got garbled in the Dem intelligentsia into the message that there is already a nonwhite majority nationwide (there won’t be until 2050 and then only if you count self described white Hispanics as nonwhites, which evidence suggests that even Hispanics don't do). The other view is that the Dems just need to mobilize their base and wait for the high school educated white voters to die off. But that’s a 50 or 100 year strategy, at best (and it’s doubtful that we will even have our present racial categories in the remote future).
Noah please start on threads . Alot of people have migrated there love to see you there you always liven up a joint
Noah - for some reason the email didn’t come through on this one. I can only see it in the app.
As an American immigrant from Europe, I put a lot of blame on the lack of birthright citizenship in Europe. Sweden (where I am from) is full of themselves for their openness and equality, but they still speak of “third-generation immigrants”. Under European law, my US-born children and grandchildren would have more legal affinity to Sweden than to the US. No wonder immigrants have a hard time assimilating in Europe.
I think it's more appearances and culture than birthright citizenship policy.
When did the myth that Japan is 99% Japanese start? That would be the speed that the sizable Korean and Chinese minority left after WW2 integrated to the point that people forgot they exist, which happened under not only a lack of birthright citizenship, but patrilineal citizenship.
I've heard that Japan is 99% Japanese for as long as I can remember, so integration without birthright citizenship happened in most a few decades at most even if it left a small faction of hard core anti-integrators who protest efforts to expand citizenship.
And yet despite birthright citizenship, there's tons of Asian Americans who trace their roots back to the railroad labor days, who still complain about lack of integration.
> When did the myth that Japan is 99% Japanese start?
Besides the integration of other Asians, this also comes from people misreading "% who are Japanese citizens" as "% who are ethnically Japanese". The government doesn't track ethnicity so there are no official numbers for it.
If Koreans and Chinese didn't fully integrate, then it should be clearly and blatantly false to anyone with even basic familiarity in Japan. However, Japan being 99% Japanese is a myth peddled by supposedly trustworthy sources.
Is that because the mainstream media have been caught with their pants down pushing fake news unapologetically for decades without any retractions when they are called out on it? Pure, intentional, malicious lying plain and simple? Or is it because Japan being 99% Japanese is somehow more accurate to the situation on the ground than Japan being <90% Japanese?
At least living in Tokyo, I've met Korean/Chinese-Japanese that are not interrogated when they say they are from some part of Japan (and likely more that never bothered to reveal their non-Yamato Japanese heritage to me), while living in the US every Asian-American including myself will often get interrogated for claiming to come from some part of the US.
Your points are all good ones. Also, the dominance of English in the United States facilitates integration, while the multiplicities of languages in Europe works against it.
Anecdotal, but we spent a month each in Spain and Portugal this past year. Encountered various African immigrants, usually out on the streets or plazas trying to sell trinkets and junk to tourists. They all spoke perfect English. I have no idea how their Spanish/Portuguese was.
Isn't the real problem with MENA immigrants not so much with the religion as with the highly kin-centric nature of its society, as exemplified by its high rate of paternal cousin marriage?
I remember reading someone on Twitter who attacked the stigma now attached to the Palestinian keffiyeh, likening it to Scottish tartan, and I replied (they blocked me almost immediately, suggesting I struck a nerve) by pointing out that that analogy was more accurate than they realized, given that tartan is not generally Scottish but specifically Highland, and integrating the Highland clans was a real problem historically for the British state: it contributed to the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and the British state actually banned traditional Highland dress for some time afterwards.