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?
“ 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?
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).
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?
“ 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?
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.