--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote: I also beg to differ with the supposed homogenization of the US population. US actively promoted immigration to "solve" its labor shortages problems and fight unionization - which had two major effects:
- it increased ethnic diversity which fragmented any labor movement;
--
That was true at the time, when being from Poland or Ireland or wherever was actually important to White Americans, and is probably true now insofar as one is talking about immigrants from Latin America. But nobody White in the US past a first or second-generation immigrant (like me, moved to the States when I was 5) really cares where their ancestors are from beyond them being from Europe. Similarly, immigrants from places as different as Argentina and El Salvador all become "Latinos." Whereas in Russia, if your ancestors were Poles or Germans, you are STILL a Pole or a German, not a Russian, even if your family has been living in Russia since the 1700s, and it said it on your passport too up until new ones got issued in 1996 or so. (You _are_ a "rossiyanin," but that just means "person who lives in Russia," and has no ethnic meaning.) The tendency is toward preservation of difference, not subsumption of it. In fact the number of official Russian nationalities is multiplying, not shrinking -- Cossacks finally got themselves declared an ethnicity in 1992, and a group of Christian Tatars who wanted to distinguish themselves from Muslim Tatars did the same thing.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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