It demonstrates that the Irish, for a time, had outsized political power, at the expense of the Poles, who outnumber them dramatically. In the time scale you're talking about, essentially everybody is an immigrant. Meanwhile: what's the immigrant ethnic bloc exercising outsized power in Chicago today?

▲

rayiner 3 days ago | parent [-]

The problem isn’t about which ethnic bloc has more power, it’s that people have such strong ethnic identities that they’re forming ethnic political blocs in the first place and doling out patronage on the basis of ethnic group. That’s a recipe for dysfunction and corruption, as we see in Chicago. People will forgive a lot of corruption and graft for their ethnic tribe. And the winners of those elections are robbing the treasury to pay for benefits targeted at their co-ethnics.

150 years after their inception, assimilation of ethnic whites has largely ended those political machines. But the effects are cumulative. Chicago still lives with the consequences of the machine politics of the Cermak to Daley era. And ethnic politics still plays a large role in Chicago between whites, hispanics, and black people: https://www.hispanicfederation.org/news/new-poll-shows-dead-... (“One interesting finding is that one-third of Latinos think Vallas may be Latino.”).

▲

tptacek 3 days ago | parent [-]

But that's exactly what your source doesn't show. There are more Polish people living in Chicago than in Krakow; it's the largest population of ethnic Poles in the world anywhere outside of the largest metros in Poland itself. And they don't effectively exert power as a bloc. Your source shows one bloc, of Irish; today, the most effective wielders of power in Chicago are Black. There's no coherent immigration story to tell here.

It comes off a little bit like it would if you claimed that immigration brings with it organized crime, because La Cosa Nostra was dominated by Italians. But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.

People share affinities and affinities structure interactions, and naturally some of those structural affinities are going to be ethnic. But if they weren't ethnic, they'd be religious, or political, or economic, which is what US history actually demonstrates.

If you're going to make the case that any of this matters in Chicago politics, though: cite the immigrant bloc that controls and distorts Chicago politics. Which ones are the illegitimate aldermen? I don't like most Chicago alderpeople, so you're not going to hurt my feelings.

▲

rayiner 3 days ago | parent [-]

The article says Poles did have ethnic identity: “What little has been written about Poles suggests that the Wolfinger view may be correct: Polish Americans still vote for Poles if they have the opportunity to do so.” The article’s thesis is that Poles were unable to effectively exercise power as a block because the Irish got there first and froze them out of the ethnic grifting.

Whether or not tribalism exists among white ethnics today is besides the point. Corruption is self-perpetuating. The real question is what Chicago would look like today if it had never experienced mass immigration, starting with the Irish. I strongly suspect it would be a better governed city today, like Toronto before the recent mass immigration.

There is a single well-governed city in the world that has experienced mass immigration from multiple ethnic groups, and that’s Singapore. And that’s got an authoritarian, top-down government, and seems to be engaged in selective immigration to maintain a stable ethnic composition and Chinese supermajority.

> But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.

There’s two different things. Mass immigration alone gives rise to ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict, which undermines democracy. Then sometimes you import specific problems from specific places. Organized crime is a bigger problem in Italy even today than in England or Scandinavia. And it was a definitive part of the story of Italians in America. It took decades to eradicate that problem.

	▲	tptacek 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't say they didn't have an ethnic identity! I live just outside of Berwyn! I used to live on the north side! There are obviously Poles in Chicago. I asked if you could point to a way in which Polish concentration in Chicago had distorted our politics, especially since your source is mostly about how the Poles got stuffed by people who were here longer than them. Now we're talking about Singapore for some reason. Is that a concession that you can't identify the aldermen who are illegitimated by their immigrant support?