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Multiculturalism reconsidered

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On Merkel's speech:
One extreme consequence:
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On October 22nd, 2010 02:02 pm (UTC), psychohist commented:
The U.S., with respect to latin American illegal immigrants, is about two decades behind the Germans with their Turkish gastarbeiter; the Turkish started going to Germany in large numbers in the 1960s, when U.S. immigration was still largely from overseas groups from Europe and Asia that have since assimilated well.

It's not just the economic mobility, though. The Spanish and Vietnamese gastarbeiter assimilated well in the second generation; the Turkish did not. I can believe the Spanish might have been less discriminated against than the Turks, but that doesn't seem to be the case for the Vietnamese.

The correct expanation must explain not only the immigrant populations that fail to assimilate, but also those that succeed.

My personal belief is that failure to adopt the local language has a lot to do with it; language differences make communication difficult and thus tend to accentuate cultural and economic splits. However, that may also be a symptom as well as a cause.

The observable differences between the different cases has to do with conditions back in the home country. The Spanish economy eventually improved to the point that going back to Spain became a competitive economic option. The Vietnamese probably didn't dare go back for fear of political persecution, though I could be wrong about that. The Turks could go back, but only to the same poor economic conditions that caused them to leave in the first place.

The other possible difference is a policy of assimilation - U.S. immigration used to focus on the path to citizenship that required learning English and learning American history and civics - versus a policy of cultural separation, whether in the form of explicit multiculturalism as in Germany or simply sweeping the cultural differences under the rug as in the U.S.
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