It's not entirely clear to me what the goal of this article is supposed to be. The sub header claims this is instructional for democrats (US democratic party adherents?) but then generally...
It's not entirely clear to me what the goal of this article is supposed to be. The sub header claims this is instructional for democrats (US democratic party adherents?) but then generally outlines some metrics at how the US is already outperforming Europe. So what's there to learn?
Is it a hit piece on European immigration policy then? Unfortunately it's not clear and some of the metrics used are spurious and/or irrelevant in a European context. Comparing the UK Pakistani diaspora to the US Pakistani diaspora shows a definitive lack of understanding why they're "underperforming" in the UK. They didn't just show up one day as refugees y'know.
But most crucially, if it is indeed a critique of EU policy, it fails to ask and answer the most important question: Does the EU even want this type of immigration to succeed?
From the article, the point/goal is this: Basically, to observe Europe's successes (and especially failures) and use that knowledge to improve US immigration policy. Not to put too fine a point on...
From the article, the point/goal is this:
Understanding the differences between U.S. immigration and European immigration is indeed a very good idea if you want to design better, smarter U.S. immigration policy — but that’s going to look like “not making Europe’s mistakes” much more than adopting Europe’s solutions... None of this is to reject that an anti-immigration backlash happened in the U.S. or to argue that current U.S. immigration policy is great, no notes. There are huge improvements achievable, and we should be laser focused on achieving them, but doing that requires a clear-eyed view of what works and what doesn’t.
Basically, to observe Europe's successes (and especially failures) and use that knowledge to improve US immigration policy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that US immigration policy is more successful doesn't mean there's nothing to learn.
Comparing the UK Pakistani diaspora to the US Pakistani diaspora shows a definitive lack of understanding why they're "underperforming" in the UK. They didn't just show up one day as refugees y'know.
I'm pretty sure Kelsey Piper is aware of British India : )
This was her exact point:
The U.S. immigration system benefits from low geographic distance to culturally more proximate countries and institutional filters that select for employability.
Getting to the United States from the Middle East typically requires a university admission, an employer sponsor, or an established family network. Getting to Europe from the same region more often means an asylum claim or family reunification from earlier guest-worker flows...
She specifically calls it out as a selection effect in the US!
That's something that's largely ignored whenever I come across threads about immigration because people always want to compare the US and EU when it comes to racism and immigration. But this is...
The U.S. immigration system benefits from low geographic distance to culturally more proximate countries and institutional filters that select for employability.
That's something that's largely ignored whenever I come across threads about immigration because people always want to compare the US and EU when it comes to racism and immigration. But this is exactly why it's not really a valid comparison.
Yeah, it's something that gets missed when comparing anti immigrant sentiment in the US and in the EU. The EU has far higher immigration rates from countries with entirely different cultures than...
Yeah, it's something that gets missed when comparing anti immigrant sentiment in the US and in the EU.
The EU has far higher immigration rates from countries with entirely different cultures than mainstream European cultures, on a fundemental level. The values are different, the religions are different, the cultural expectations are different.
The US and central/South America are really very similar culturally, as much as anti immigrant folks over here like to pretend they aren't.
They speak a different language, but they're predominantly christian, secular, generally have the same opinions on human rights and the role of governments in enforcing them and so on. It's not surprising that within a generation, an immigrant family from Mexico perfectly blends in with the larger American culture, but that's less so the case with immigrants to European countries from the middle east. Their cultures are just nearly as closely similar.
This makes sense when you think about the history. Every country in the American has been filtered, their dominant cultural influences were from a relatively small group of European settlers 500 years ago. Spain for Latin America, and England and France for North America. Europe and the middle east all trace their cultural roots back tens of thousands of years where independent cultures evolved, where those cultures clashed, it resulted in some of the most brutal, drawn out warfare in human history. The Americas, by comparison, have essentially a European culture, with some native and African influence which additionally serve to bring all of the cultures on the contents here together culturally closer.
Backlash against immigrants in the US is much more likely to be just basic racism, and thus entirely irrational, versus immigration backlash in Europe potentially being more founded on those cultural differences.
Comparing those migration patterns as if policy is the only difference is a fools errand.
Well in NA liberals = left wing, whereas in EU liberals = right wing. But the authors of the article are American. So yeah, doesn't make a ton sense either way.
Well in NA liberals = left wing, whereas in EU liberals = right wing. But the authors of the article are American. So yeah, doesn't make a ton sense either way.
After President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, a clear consensus began to harden among many liberals and Democratic lawmakers: Immigration did this, and Denmark has the answer.
But I don't see that as accurate - I see articles saying Democrats can or should learn from Denmark. I see articles about Denmark's left wing becoming tough on immigration. And maybe this article...
But I don't see that as accurate - I see articles saying Democrats can or should learn from Denmark. I see articles about Denmark's left wing becoming tough on immigration. And maybe this article is responding to those previous ones.
I don't see evidence that there was any clear consensus among liberals/Dems in the US nor that there is today.
US democrat politicians have definitely tried to crack down on their immigration policy in an attempt to appeal to conservative voters, though, even if it's not universal consensus among US...
US democrat politicians have definitely tried to crack down on their immigration policy in an attempt to appeal to conservative voters, though, even if it's not universal consensus among US liberals as a voting bloc, though. I'm not really in the liberal political space enough to know whether they're explicitly calling for us to emulate countries like Denmark when it comes to immigration policy, but I think if that's ever the case, we should certainly pay attention to their failures. There's often an "everything is better in Western European social democracies and we should do exactly what they do" sentiment among US liberals, and while this is sometimes true, it's important to point out when this is not the case, be it about immigration or something else (I wouldn't want the US to emulate any of these countries when it comes to trans healthcare, for example).
Granted, I'm biased because I've experienced immigration in an EU country as an immigrant and watched the government make it worse in real time, so I think it's valuable to criticize their failings even without the comparison to the US. But ofc comparison to the US is kinda the center of this article.
For sure they have, but there hasn't been a clear consensus of Denmark is doing it right. There have been articles about how the left needs to look at Denmark for how to do immigration right but...
For sure they have, but there hasn't been a clear consensus of Denmark is doing it right. There have been articles about how the left needs to look at Denmark for how to do immigration right but this wasn't coming from the Democrats or the left. It was coming from the Washington Post opinion page and the like.
It's very concern-trolling post-mortem on the election and not an internal political consensus thing. I am in left-er spaces than liberal ones, but I have followed the Dem party and the spaces I'm in comment on the frustrations they have with liberals. Denmark hasn't come up in an immigration conversation at all in the past 2 years.
Maybe there's some other knowledge somewhere or this author is talking to the Party more directly or I just was out of the loop on a particular convo but I think it's just a poor framing for what feels like a different point altogether
I agree it's not clear there's consensus; I don't perceive a united stance either. But I feel in the winds a shift towards restriction. Certainly I've heard it spoken from more left-leaning...
I agree it's not clear there's consensus; I don't perceive a united stance either. But I feel in the winds a shift towards restriction. Certainly I've heard it spoken from more left-leaning identifying people this decade than the 2000s, but it's all anecdotal and not enough to say that the stance has hardened amongst liberals.
I think that's why I'm confused by the framing of the article. It's not that there aren't people on the left wanting to be hard on immigrations the same way that they will talk about me. Tough on...
I think that's why I'm confused by the framing of the article. It's not that there aren't people on the left wanting to be hard on immigrations the same way that they will talk about me. Tough on crime. Personally, I think that is the wrong angle but they are there. But especially now I feel like that is not the language being used 2 years after the election. And like I said 2024 I did not feel that that was the consensus then either.
It's just a weird tagline/ set up to make what feels like an entirely different point.
By virtually every metric that matters — employment, crime, fiscal contribution, second-generation mobility — immigration is working dramatically better here than across the Atlantic. Understanding the differences between U.S. immigration and European immigration is indeed a very good idea if you want to design better, smarter U.S. immigration policy — but that’s going to look like “not making Europe’s mistakes” much more than adopting Europe’s solutions.
[...]
The most important reason why immigration is more successful in the United States is the simplest: Europe makes it structurally much harder for immigrants to work.
Most European countries ban asylum seekers from working for six to nine months after filing their claims, often longer in practice. The intent is often explained as discouraging people who are entering for economic reasons from making spurious asylum claims. But about 1 million applications for asylum are filed each year despite this discouragement, and most of those people then become dependents of the state — or participate in the illegal economy — at least for the first while.
What employment bans actually produce is lasting economic scarring: People lose skills, lose contact with employers, and get pushed into informal work or dependency. The negative employment effects persist up to a decade after arrival. And by design, the bans feed the very dynamic of immigrants as a fiscal burden that fuels public backlash.
The United States, for all its dysfunction, lets most immigrants start working almost immediately. And the results are dramatic. The U.S. is a global outlier: refugee employment rates are comparable to those of economic immigrants from arrival. In Europe, it takes refugees a decade or two to narrow that gap.
[...]
In the U.K., asylum seekers banned from working increased property crime; EU workers with labor market access did not. Using Italian legalization as a regression discontinuity, Paolo Pinotti estimated that granting legal work status reduced immigrant crime by roughly 50%.
The United States also bars asylum seekers from working for 180 days. So why does it still outperform? Because until recently, most humanitarian immigrants to the U.S. were resettled refugees who received work authorization on arrival, not asylum seekers subject to the waiting period.
When the recent southern border surge changed that, the results looked more European.
In reaction, New York City spent billions housing people barred from earning a living. This is the closest the U.S. has come to running the European experiment on its own soil, and it produced exactly the outcomes Leonhardt attributed to immigration itself rather than to the policy regime surrounding it.
[...]
Sweden is the instructive failure case.
No country in Europe has invested more in integration services, language classes, and social support. Yet Swedish integration outcomes have been among the worst in the OECD. The lesson is that integration effort does not equal integration design.
You cannot integrate people into a labor market that will not hire them, and spending generously on language courses while maintaining employment bans and rigid hiring practices is the policy equivalent of teaching someone to swim and then barring them from the pool.
Couple of thoughts as I read through it, but not coherent enough to form into a deeper post. Labor force participation being linked to satisfaction of the native population sounds plausible, but...
Couple of thoughts as I read through it, but not coherent enough to form into a deeper post.
Labor force participation being linked to satisfaction of the native population sounds plausible, but Spain is a bad example because its number of refugees is far lower than Germany's, the refugees going to Spain are way more likely to speak Spanish, Spain is insulated from the non-Spanish speaking refugees, and finally Spain is intentionally seeking out Spanish speakers from former colonies to migrate to improve its labor pool. So satisfaction levels will be significantly higher than Germany's, where the country feels like the problem is foisted on them.
France actually needs to replenish its work force otherwise its pension system will break down. It's stupid they're not making it easier for immigrants to work.
This article is interesting to think about for the long term, but the optics of arguing that America is good at immigration when it's this administration in office aren't great. A little too self-congratulatory.
I think further exploration of assimilation should look at density of immigrants. Do the same ethnicities end up sticking to one area more in Europe than the US? That likely affects assimilation. Is it true that some second generation kids don't bother to learn the country's tongue? That would be exceedingly rare in the US but I'd heard offhand that was sometimes the case in Europe with refugees. Policies should strive to balance between comforting and integrating immigrants.
Germany recently defunded its integration courses, so I'm not particularly convinced the government cares whatsoever about actually integrating refugees rather than just punishing people for not...
Germany recently defunded its integration courses, so I'm not particularly convinced the government cares whatsoever about actually integrating refugees rather than just punishing people for not being born in Germany.
It's not entirely clear to me what the goal of this article is supposed to be. The sub header claims this is instructional for democrats (US democratic party adherents?) but then generally outlines some metrics at how the US is already outperforming Europe. So what's there to learn?
Is it a hit piece on European immigration policy then? Unfortunately it's not clear and some of the metrics used are spurious and/or irrelevant in a European context. Comparing the UK Pakistani diaspora to the US Pakistani diaspora shows a definitive lack of understanding why they're "underperforming" in the UK. They didn't just show up one day as refugees y'know.
But most crucially, if it is indeed a critique of EU policy, it fails to ask and answer the most important question: Does the EU even want this type of immigration to succeed?
From the article, the point/goal is this:
Basically, to observe Europe's successes (and especially failures) and use that knowledge to improve US immigration policy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that US immigration policy is more successful doesn't mean there's nothing to learn.
I'm pretty sure Kelsey Piper is aware of British India : )
This was her exact point:
She specifically calls it out as a selection effect in the US!
Edited to add words for clarity.
That's something that's largely ignored whenever I come across threads about immigration because people always want to compare the US and EU when it comes to racism and immigration. But this is exactly why it's not really a valid comparison.
Yeah, it's something that gets missed when comparing anti immigrant sentiment in the US and in the EU.
The EU has far higher immigration rates from countries with entirely different cultures than mainstream European cultures, on a fundemental level. The values are different, the religions are different, the cultural expectations are different.
The US and central/South America are really very similar culturally, as much as anti immigrant folks over here like to pretend they aren't.
They speak a different language, but they're predominantly christian, secular, generally have the same opinions on human rights and the role of governments in enforcing them and so on. It's not surprising that within a generation, an immigrant family from Mexico perfectly blends in with the larger American culture, but that's less so the case with immigrants to European countries from the middle east. Their cultures are just nearly as closely similar.
This makes sense when you think about the history. Every country in the American has been filtered, their dominant cultural influences were from a relatively small group of European settlers 500 years ago. Spain for Latin America, and England and France for North America. Europe and the middle east all trace their cultural roots back tens of thousands of years where independent cultures evolved, where those cultures clashed, it resulted in some of the most brutal, drawn out warfare in human history. The Americas, by comparison, have essentially a European culture, with some native and African influence which additionally serve to bring all of the cultures on the contents here together culturally closer.
Backlash against immigrants in the US is much more likely to be just basic racism, and thus entirely irrational, versus immigration backlash in Europe potentially being more founded on those cultural differences.
Comparing those migration patterns as if policy is the only difference is a fools errand.
The subheader seems to be referring to L/liberals in Europe? Maybe? But that doesn't make a ton of sense.
Well in NA liberals = left wing, whereas in EU liberals = right wing. But the authors of the article are American. So yeah, doesn't make a ton sense either way.
Right, unless they want conservatives to learn that Denmark is too strict? It just doesn't make sense to me
Liberals in America.
But I don't see that as accurate - I see articles saying Democrats can or should learn from Denmark. I see articles about Denmark's left wing becoming tough on immigration. And maybe this article is responding to those previous ones.
I don't see evidence that there was any clear consensus among liberals/Dems in the US nor that there is today.
US democrat politicians have definitely tried to crack down on their immigration policy in an attempt to appeal to conservative voters, though, even if it's not universal consensus among US liberals as a voting bloc, though. I'm not really in the liberal political space enough to know whether they're explicitly calling for us to emulate countries like Denmark when it comes to immigration policy, but I think if that's ever the case, we should certainly pay attention to their failures. There's often an "everything is better in Western European social democracies and we should do exactly what they do" sentiment among US liberals, and while this is sometimes true, it's important to point out when this is not the case, be it about immigration or something else (I wouldn't want the US to emulate any of these countries when it comes to trans healthcare, for example).
Granted, I'm biased because I've experienced immigration in an EU country as an immigrant and watched the government make it worse in real time, so I think it's valuable to criticize their failings even without the comparison to the US. But ofc comparison to the US is kinda the center of this article.
For sure they have, but there hasn't been a clear consensus of Denmark is doing it right. There have been articles about how the left needs to look at Denmark for how to do immigration right but this wasn't coming from the Democrats or the left. It was coming from the Washington Post opinion page and the like.
It's very concern-trolling post-mortem on the election and not an internal political consensus thing. I am in left-er spaces than liberal ones, but I have followed the Dem party and the spaces I'm in comment on the frustrations they have with liberals. Denmark hasn't come up in an immigration conversation at all in the past 2 years.
Maybe there's some other knowledge somewhere or this author is talking to the Party more directly or I just was out of the loop on a particular convo but I think it's just a poor framing for what feels like a different point altogether
I agree it's not clear there's consensus; I don't perceive a united stance either. But I feel in the winds a shift towards restriction. Certainly I've heard it spoken from more left-leaning identifying people this decade than the 2000s, but it's all anecdotal and not enough to say that the stance has hardened amongst liberals.
I think that's why I'm confused by the framing of the article. It's not that there aren't people on the left wanting to be hard on immigrations the same way that they will talk about me. Tough on crime. Personally, I think that is the wrong angle but they are there. But especially now I feel like that is not the language being used 2 years after the election. And like I said 2024 I did not feel that that was the consensus then either.
It's just a weird tagline/ set up to make what feels like an entirely different point.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
Couple of thoughts as I read through it, but not coherent enough to form into a deeper post.
Labor force participation being linked to satisfaction of the native population sounds plausible, but Spain is a bad example because its number of refugees is far lower than Germany's, the refugees going to Spain are way more likely to speak Spanish, Spain is insulated from the non-Spanish speaking refugees, and finally Spain is intentionally seeking out Spanish speakers from former colonies to migrate to improve its labor pool. So satisfaction levels will be significantly higher than Germany's, where the country feels like the problem is foisted on them.
France actually needs to replenish its work force otherwise its pension system will break down. It's stupid they're not making it easier for immigrants to work.
This article is interesting to think about for the long term, but the optics of arguing that America is good at immigration when it's this administration in office aren't great. A little too self-congratulatory.
I think further exploration of assimilation should look at density of immigrants. Do the same ethnicities end up sticking to one area more in Europe than the US? That likely affects assimilation. Is it true that some second generation kids don't bother to learn the country's tongue? That would be exceedingly rare in the US but I'd heard offhand that was sometimes the case in Europe with refugees. Policies should strive to balance between comforting and integrating immigrants.
Germany recently defunded its integration courses, so I'm not particularly convinced the government cares whatsoever about actually integrating refugees rather than just punishing people for not being born in Germany.