alt Hacker NewsNo, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers.
Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
China is the opposite of that. You are hard hammered into the Han-ness, immediately. The language, the writing (which is a HUGE hurdle), the food, the way of life.
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>No, total immigration matters. Human progress is always subject to the law large numbers.
Human change can be subject to the law of large numbers, but nothing necessitates any particular change being towards progress.
>Skilled polish engineers don't want to be the only polish person in the entire country. They want food, culture, community that reminds them of home. Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well. It encourages enclaves that touch one another.
The American melting pot works well (or worked well) because it was a nation made up from a blank canvas with no prior historically established dominant ethnicity or culture the kind other nations have had going for millenia.
And even at that was built on first disenfranchizing (to put it midly) the natives.
> Even as they assimilate. That's why the American melting pot works well.
I feel like a lot of Americans disagree on these nowadays though, no? Source: just look at recent campaigns and elections.
> American melting pot
For what it's worth, this is the terminology I learned in school decades ago, but I don't think it's preferred anymore. My daughter has a book that calls it a "salad" instead (mixed but retaining their respective properties). I'm probably just old and crotchety but I like that way less.