Pre-Assimilation

An especially clever argument by Nathan Smith:

[G]lobalization has half-Americanized half the world already. 19th-century immigrants may have been racially more similar to America’s white native majority, but they were less familiar with democracy, with the English language, with America via movies and music and TV, with American-style market capitalism, with Coke and McDonalds and Microsoft and Google and many other American firms, with blue jeans and free speech and religious tolerance, than a 19th-century immigrant from the Hapbsurg empire or tsarist Russia. There are lots and lots of foreigners who could show up on an American college campus or in an American corporate office building and fit in, just fine, almost immediately. There’s no reason to think that 15% or so was ever an upper bound on the foreign-born share of the population that America could absorb, and that upper bound is probably much higher today, because of cultural assimilation that has occurs across international borders, with the influences running both from abroad to America and from America to abroad, though the latter direction of influence is surely more important.

In short, the marriage of modern technology and Western culture has covertly pre-assimilated hundreds of millions of “foreigners” around the globe.

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