Assimilation as an organic process
In the 2021 episode “The Immigration Crisis in Context,” Alex Nowrasteh, identified as Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, describes research on “ethnic attrition,” which he defines as the intermarriage of ethnic minorities — immigrants or the children of immigrants — outside their racial or ethnic group, with the result that their children are much less likely to identify with that minority. He calls this a major reason for the extent of assimilation, “especially amongst Hispanic immigrants.” Nowrasteh illustrates the point with his own family: his father’s side is Iranian and his mother’s side European, and he has always identified on surveys as being of white European background, a fact he says never mattered to him as an important part of his identity. He states that there are tens of millions of other Americans like that, who have never thought about it, attributing this to the way the country, through intermarriage, assimilation, and the power of its culture, “turns us all into Americans” and continues doing so The Immigration Crisis in Context (2021).
Bob Zadek responds with a framing of American culture as inherently assimilative. He says the American culture by definition has assimilation as a component, that it is the mix of everybody, that it started off being zero, and that it is the result of a mixture — “the stew.” If the stew has more carrots and less potatoes and more meat, he says, it is still stew, and stew is the American culture. He then asks whether the Amish, who live separately in the Midwest with their own culture and are, in his words, as foreign as foreign can be, represent an existential threat to America. He extends the same question to the Chinatowns, Japantowns, and Little Italys around the country, and to the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and elsewhere in New York, describing these as extreme examples of non-assimilation and asking whether anyone feels America is diminished by them. Nowrasteh adds the fundamentalist Latter-day Saints as his favorite example: Mormons who disagreed with the Church of Latter-day Saints turning against polygamy and other modern rulings, many of whom live in the Arizona Strip, the portion of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon separated from the rest of the state, where they practice polygamy, live in collectivist organizations, and live off the grid. He says they have not assimilated to American culture in almost any way, are like the Amish in their separateness, and are not an existential threat either The Immigration Crisis in Context (2021).
Labor markets and economic integration
In the 2022 episode “The Economics of Immigration,” Bob Zadek introduces assimilation as a social and political issue on which he finds the discussion overheated, “much ado about nothing,” and asks Benjamin Powell, identified as Executive Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, to comment on the threat of non-assimilation and the benefits of assimilation. Powell answers that assimilation is important to make things go more smoothly and relates to the policy and institutions in place, comparing the United States and Europe in their handling of more recent migration waves. He says there are definitely more difficulties culturally in assimilation in Europe than in the United States, some unique to historical past but much of it coming from labor market institutions. He notes that Zadek had mentioned minimum wages enacted in response to the African American migration in the United States a hundred years ago, and says something similar exists in Europe today: relatively high minimum wages relative to productivity and laws making it difficult to impossible to fire employees once hired, depending on the country. He tells his students to imagine having to promise to marry somebody with no possibility of divorce before being allowed to go on a first date, and says that is what it is like to be a French employer. Such laws, he argues, make it very difficult to economically integrate immigrants because their productivity is low relative to the minimum wage and because immigrants are a risky bet when hiring, so employers are more likely to hire a known person; this also cuts against why youth unemployment is so high in Europe The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Powell continues that once immigrants are not integrated economically through the labor market, they turn to each other and enclave, resent the host society, and are resented back, producing the ugly dynamic seen in Europe. He contrasts this with Somali immigrants, whom he says integrate better into the United States than in Europe, which he attributes to a more flexible labor market. Once people are in and working, he says, commerce is a great equalizer and a great blender; it destroys prejudices and allows for greater harmony when everyone benefits each other through exchange. He concludes that it is important to keep economic freedoms and labor markets in order to better integrate immigrants. Zadek responds that he wants the point not to be lost: comparing Western Europe’s handling of assimilation and relatively large waves of immigrants with the United States, he says the difference is that in the United States there are areas of non-assimilation — the large Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn and elsewhere in New York State, the Amish in Pennsylvania and like groups that are more comfortable together — but in the United States non-assimilation is by choice, by preference, whereas in Western Europe the absence of assimilation is by government action, with governments discouraging assimilation. In the United States, he says, we either encourage it or are at least neutral as a system of laws, with fewer laws interfering with assimilation The Economics of Immigration (2022).
Cultural retention and political assimilation
In the 2023 episode “American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why.,” Bob Zadek returns to assimilation as an argument used by opponents of immigration, saying they claim immigrants are slow to assimilate. He offers two comments. First, he says some groups never assimilate: the Amish in Ohio, whom he says refuse to drive EVs and even cars; the Chinatowns of New York City and San Francisco and other cities; Japantown in Los Angeles; and the Haredi Jews in Brooklyn, New York, who he says refuse to assimilate, integrate themselves in New York City economic life, participate, and then go back to Brooklyn and live their very insular, in many ways almost medieval lifestyle — a description he offers with respect and curiosity, not as a pejorative. He says none of that threatens him. He then distinguishes two concepts lumped together under assimilation: cultural assimilation, which he says he is not threatened by and welcomes, and political assimilation. The fear, he says, is that many immigrants come from authoritarian regimes, socialist societies, communist societies, collectivism, and bring those political views with them, representing a threat to what nativists call “our way of life” — a phrase he says he hates American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Nowrasteh answers that he has no problem at all with people trying to retain unique aspects of their culture, as Haredi Jews in New York, the Amish, or Chinese immigrants do. On the nativist fear, he says the broad facts show the vast majority of immigrants and their kids move toward American norms, including on political issues: polls of new immigrants on various political and policy issues, compared with native-born Americans, show very similar results, usually within the standard of error, a statistically insignificant difference across a host of issues from tax policy to welfare policy. He acknowledges that a lot of immigrants do come from countries with authoritarian or socialist governments, but says the people who leave are generally different from those who stay behind — usually they do not like the policies at home and are open to new experiences and ideas. He cites Cubans, Taiwanese immigrants, Vietnamese immigrants, Venezuelan immigrants, and many Iranian immigrants from Iran, describing all as totalitarian societies in different ways, and says these groups vote against those types of policies in the United States; Cubans, he says, are a massive anti-left-wing voting bloc in Florida and other states because of their experiences with communism in Cuba. He refers to his book Wretched Refuse, written with Benjamin Powell, whose general finding he describes as being that when immigrants go to a society, looking at how they affect the economic freedom of that society — how free you are to exchange in goods and services — across many countries over time, immigrants either do not affect it at all or result in more free-market policies for a number of reasons. He adds that the most socialistic, government-interventionist period in United States history was from about 1930 to about 1970, with the New Deal, numerous nationalizations, and the Great Society programs, a period when immigration was closed off, and offers the theory that immigrants undermine labor unions, which he calls the most effective pro-big-government voting and lobbying bloc in the Western world, thereby accidentally slowing the growth of government American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Across episodes: the same question, extended
The same question — whether immigrants assimilate and whether non-assimilation threatens the country — is argued in the 2021, 2022, and 2023 episodes, with Alex Nowrasteh advancing the argument in 2021 and 2023 and Benjamin Powell advancing it in 2022. What changes is the mechanism each guest emphasizes: Nowrasteh in 2021 stresses intermarriage and ethnic attrition as the engine of assimilation, Powell in 2022 stresses labor-market flexibility and contrasts American integration with European enclaving, and Nowrasteh in 2023 adds polling evidence on political attitudes and the argument that immigrants either do not reduce or increase economic freedom. Bob Zadek’s framing recurs across the episodes — the “stew” of American culture in 2021, the choice-versus-government-action distinction in 2022, and the cultural-versus-political assimilation distinction in 2023 — and the 2023 episode extends the discussion to the culture wars, with Nowrasteh arguing that wokeness and racial essentialism were created by Americans for Americans rather than imported by immigrants, and that immigrants poll as less woke than native-born Americans. The excerpts show development in the specificity of the arguments rather than a change in position.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the name of any bill, the holding of any case, or the amendment any case turned on in connection with assimilation. They do not give founding dates or the text of founding principles beyond general references to the country’s founding principles in episode summaries. The 2013 episode “Let Them All In” is represented only by a summary and a list of topics and speakers, with no quoted discussion of assimilation, so it is not used above. The final excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in Nowrasteh’s answer about government growth, and nothing beyond that point is reported here.