Scott,

Would the same hold true of electoral returns on a county level within a given US State? Federal and State expendature and tax revenue stats are available to the public. If one were to consider only urban versus rural numbers, and neglect suburban counties, wouldn’t that suggest something similar in terms of “public service based fiscal analysis” to your own claim?

Furthermore, I’d suggest that not ALL migrants fit quite as neatly into the lowest segment of the economic food chain often presumed. South and East Asia migrants form a large enough portion of the applicant pool competing for higher education that they’ve found themselves in the dubious category of “over-represented minorities” at many academic institutions (UCal Berkeley and UofMichigan to name two)… And this includes bi- and tri-lingual Muslim migrants who, like the majority of the worlds Muslim population, neither read nor write Arabic, and don’t speak Arabic as their native language.

I wish I could agree.
we, as immigrants, have to work at exposing yourself at what our fellow countrymen/women would take in by osmosis.

Yes, it’s easier to do than it ever has been, thanks to the Internet. But you still have to do triage, because you can’t completely focus on following your home culture to the exclusion of the culture that you’re living in (well, you can, but then you’d be better off repatriating).

That’s work that the subsequent generations may not be able or willing to make, as they build themselves a cultural identity that’s less tied to their parent’s remote home culture than it is to the one that they’re acquiring by osmosis. And they will lack the life experiences that shaped the framework that you use to evaluate events at home.

xavier

Anyone who has ever worked on a contracting job, or on a film shoot, will know how important it is to have a dependable, pre-budgeted crew on hand. There is no room for bricolage in large undertakings where time is an important factor.

Bricolage works well exactly in cases you’ve cited: an unexpected need solved ingeniously by local talent bringing in unusual skills. But I can cite countless cases where I’ve been stuck in production because someone just assumed things would work out by themselves in the end. I’d much rather had paid extra to make sure things indeed did work out.

xavier

Your counter-example of Arabs in France is a perfect example of what I mean. Franco-Arabs do not yet have socio-economic parity in France.

Your point about them having been in France more than three generations is misleading; the Franco-Arab population has exploded in the last twenty years. Most are immigrants and 1st generation. we’d need another 30-60 years to see if their language cohesion lasts, and/or if they still remain as second-class citizens.

Otherwise, Language integration efforts began in France with Fran?ois Ier, not with the french revolution. And yes, the hold-outs were rural peasants. But the British phrase ’speak the king’s english’, is not from the twentieth century, either.

Up until the 60s I believe, Quebec was run by an english elite with the french-speaking majority essentially marginalized. The political backlash, once loosed, lasted well over thirty years.

And many of the same steps that Canada took to pacify the Quebecois, are being adopted in the U.S. with regards to spanish-speaking latinos, albeit with a twenty-ish year lag. But more importantly, without the threat of secession by a major chunk of the country.

I said that some go to “an almost absurd amount of trouble” to do so. The difference is important.

My statement is based largely on the feedback from a 2nd generation Lithuanian-American friend whose parents were very active in the Lithuanian-American community, after visiting Lithuania for the first time as an adult.

The Lithuanian culture that’s being preserved by Lithuanian-Americans is in divergence of actual Lithuanian culture and is in some respects a romanticization of prior Lithuanian culture. Because it serves a need in the immigrant Lithuanian American community which never had a counterpart in Lithuania.

The same could be said for the Polish-American community, the Philipino-American community, the Korean-American, to name just a few.

That said, just because their children are steeped (willingly and unwillingly) in their traditions (remembered and invented) does not mean that they are comfortable or even feel capable of returning to their parents homeland, even if they do fluently speak the language.

Speaking for myself as a child immigrant to the U.S., I couldn’t go back to France, at least not directly (though I’ve considered emigrating to a DOM/TOM as an intermediate step).

I may be fluent, but there are large gaps in my vocabulary and I lack the life experiences that would have transparently, naturally given me that vocabulary and the appropriate cultural instincts. My prior exposure is a handicap in that I don’t have the excuse of being an ignorant foreigner.

As it is for me, so it is even more so for 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants.

Across Europe, the norm until the 20th century was that communities rarely lost their languages. France was the major exception, and it took until WWII before its minority language communities (who at the time of the revolution represented a majority of the French population) became genuinely threatened despite a stated policy of suppressing minority languages.

In addition to Finland’s stable Swedish community, there are the Frisians in the Netherlands, Catalonia, the Basque country, Gallicia (although language policy there is beginning to fail), Wales (where things are mostly stable now), Roumanch in Switzerland, Finns in Sweden… these are not recent immigrant communities though.

In Latin America, German survives in Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay. Japanese held out for most of century in Brazil. English is still spoken in Panama and Nicaragua by the decendents of Jamaican immigrants from over a hundred years ago. In Asia, there are Russians in China, Jawi in Thailand and Arabs in Iran who retain their languages.

Language disappearance through integration does not happen in a three generation pattern in most places. It often takes quite a lot longer. In most places, the school system and the army are the major tools of linguistic integration.

Xavier - that NAS study was a good deal more circumspect in its findings than the anti-immigrant lobby claims. However, their model - unless I’m misreading it - considers only differences in tax payment and in the value of government service received. By looking at immigration from an exclusively tax-driven standpoint, they are completely ignoring value created through the reduced costs of service provided by immigrants, services that would cost more if they had to be performed by a smaller, better paid workforce. Comparing the price of strawberries in Belgium to the price in Berkeley would make this point quite easily.

In short, the study ignores the very reason that there are immigrants in the US: there is work for them at wages they are willing to accept.

If we were to use a purely public services based fiscal analysis, we would conclude that the United States would be a vastly better off expelling every state in the union that voted for George W Bush and keeping the states with the largest immigrant populations. If tax reciepts and estimated expenditures were the mechanism for voting people off the show, it’s rural white US citizens and Alaskans who would be the first to go.

I haven’t the time right now to get into a fight on some right-wing blog, but feel free to point this out to the folks at ParaPundit.