I think you've missed my point, which is that technology is making people assimilation resistant. I never disagreed that it takes time, or w/ any historical aspect of it.
I tend to disagree. Think about a couple of centuries ago - you lived in your own village/community, surrounded by people speaking the same language, reading newspapers published in your language. Getting to other towns or cities could take a couple of days. Getting to another country could take weeks or even months.
Now, you turn on the TV, look at the internet or step out onto the street and you're surrounded by different languages, different cultures. It's all around you. I would therefore argue that it's easier to assimilate nowadays than it was previously.
In addition, you're talking about a generally homogeneous body of immigration, which was for the most part aligned with Christianity and already had quite similar value systems. That's a much easier pill to swallow when it's mainly a language barrier.
Alternatively, in this new brand of immigration, you have wildly different cultures of which one in particular is very resistant to assimilation. All of these extreme differences are much harder to integrate, and you end up with what we have: identity politics. I think trying to equate historical immigration in the US with what is happening now ignores how different and more difficult it is.
I thing that you're engaging in some historical revisionism here.
Are you aware of just how bitterly various groups of immigrants - Irish, Italians, Slavs etc - used to detest each other?
There used to be businesses, even up to just a few decades ago, that would *only* hire Catholics or *only* hire Protestants. That was the case in countries like the US and Australia. The police force of a particular town, for example, may have been full of Irish Catholics. If you were, for example, a middle-European Protestant, you could forget about becoming a policeman, or if you did, you'd always be on the outer.
This is an anecdote, but it's not isolated - when my parents first married, they lived in a block of flats owned by a couple of Sicilian heritage. The wife was born in Australia, but she spoke hardly any English as she'd grown up surrounded by parents and friends who spoke Italian all the time. My mother - a schoolteacher - used to tutor this lady, aged in her late twenties, in English. Her young son, who had just started primary (or elementary) school, didn't want to speak Italian/Sicilian - he wanted to speak English and to play with other kids.
The Italians, Sicilians and Greeks hard largely arrived just after WWII, so had been in Australia for about 30 years by that time, as this was in the early 1970s. At the tail end of the Vietnam War, there was a sudden influx of refugees and other migrants from SE Asia - mainly from Vietnam, but also from Laos, Cambodia etc.
The Italians and other southern Europeans used to badmouth the Asians and were highly critical of them. I remember my parents telling me that they were amazed at the vitriol directed at the Vietnamese, coming from children of migrants whose families had only been here for a few decades. There was talk of the Vietnamese being criminals, of them forming ghettoes (this coming from a family who lived surrounded by Sicilians!), of not fitting in.
Now, another few decades on, everyone accepts the Italians, the Greeks and the Vietnamese. They're simply part of society. It's not unusual to fear or dislike migrants. It's not unusual to say that the latest wave won't fit in, that they're not like "us". It's been happening for centuries and, unfortunately, will probably continue to happen.
