mikema63 wrote:Cultural distance? I'm not sure how you'd go about determining that necessarily. Assuming we are only talking about values (since I personally don't care about dress, food, religion, etc.) What are the key values we are looking at and how do you determine their distance from current values?
Seeing as how american 1950s values are very different than 2000s values It seems perfectly possible to change the values of even very large groups of people to a degree. That change in the US is within many peoples lifetime after all. Even if it was rather rocky for the entire country to undergo that change we are only talking about a small fraction of the population picking up those values which should be rather less extreme to undertake.
How would you determine whether or not a group is assimilating sufficiently to allow continued immigration.
I think the actual determination of assimilation is a very important point, even if it's difficult to answer, since it's essentially the linchpin in deciding that we should not take in refugees/immigrants from the middle east right now.
I agree that it's predominantly about values, and therefore would of course include religion, i.e. how religious people are. So expectations are going to be different in the US and, say, Germany which is much more atheist.
The greater the cultural distance, the longer assimilation will tend to take. I think it would be unrealistic to expect the same rate of assimilation of British and Chinese immigrants here in NZ for instance. The former is usually fully assimilated in the second generation and often indistinguishable even in the first because NZ culture is very similar to British culture. The larger the immigrant group is the more pronounced the difference will tend to be.
As for criteria, you could use surveys - e.g. something similar to the European Values Study - together with social and economic outcomes, rate of intermarriage and segregation. Values and outcomes should converge over time, intermarriage increase and segregation if it exists decrease. In the second or third generation, immigrants should be very similar or equal to the natives.
The second half of the 20th century isn't typical for the rate of change in societies and our expectations shouldn't be based on exceptions.