Migrations and Cultures: A World View.

• Author: Schuck, Peter H.

By Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books. 1996. Pp. xii, 516. Cloth, $27.50; paper, $16.

Human beings are constantly on the move. Americans are probably the most peripatetic people in the industrialized world, with nearly twenty percent of us each year changing the location of our homes within the United States.(1) Our mobility, however, is insignificant when compared with the migrations of peoples who cross the ocean leaving their societies far behind and casting their lots with new, altogether alien ones.

Intercontinental migrations of this kind, of course, have proceeded ever since the first communities dispersed by foot across the globe in search of food, water, land, and security. In migrating, these groups have transported more than their families and possessions; they have also carried with them their language, art, religion, values, skills, practices, perspectives, and social institutions -- their unique cultures.

The distinctiveness of these migrant cultures, and the myriad ways in which they have altered the societies in which they have been transplanted, are the subjects of Thomas Sowell's stimulating book. Sowell, an academic economist who has long been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, has devoted a long and distinguished career to exploring these phenomena empirically, usually relying heavily on the field research of others. In his earlier works,(2) Sowell amassed social science and historical data, much of it cross-national, to challenge certain assumptions that are wide-spread among policymaking and intellectual elites as well as much of the general public. Exhibiting an admirable combination of academic technique, analytical seriousness, iconoclastic audacity, and ideological pugnacity, he rejected the credo of universalistic liberals and egalitarians that humans are really all the same beneath the surface. Quite the contrary, he insisted, individuals differ from one another in the most fundamental respects -- in how they perceive, think, value, express themselves, and behave. These differences, moreover, are most dramatically manifested in their economic performance, which reflects different commitments to a variety of economic virtues. These virtues include the propensity to work incredibly hard at jobs often disdained by the native population,(3) be unusually productive,(4) take entrepreneurial risks,(5) build strong families and communal institutions, invest in education and other human capital, practice extreme thrift and self-denial, constantly innovate, and so on.

Opposing the view of most social reformers, Sowell maintained that these different commitments do not primarily reflect differences in the objective conditions that prevail in the larger societies where the individuals live, such as the level of economic development and discriminatory attitudes. Instead, he argued, these differences in economic and social behavior have almost everything to do with the individuals' underlying values and practices, which in turn are shaped by the distinctive cultural patterns of their ethnic and religious groups. Finally, and most emphatically, Sowell rejected the notion, cherished by some advocates of multiculturalism, that because all cultures are different, each of them equally deserves society's respect and protection, if not nurturance. Instead, he insisted, some cultures are more economically successful and hence more worthy of emulation than others -- at least if wealth is a value.(6)

THE ANALYTIC PROTECT

Migrations and Cultures recapitulates these themes of individual striving, cultural determinism, group differences, and economic standards of achievement -- but it plays them out on a global scale. Sowell has selected six ethnic groups for special attention: Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Jews, and the Indians of south Asia. In their destination countries, large fractions of each of these groups, albeit to different extents,(7) acted as a "middleman minority," by which Sowell means that its members predominate in occupations that facilitate the movement of goods and services from the producer or supplier to the consumer, without necessarily physically transforming such goods and services. Middleman functions include retailing, wholesaling, moneylending, brokerage, and the like. Throughout the world, Sowell notes, the economic functions performed by middlemen are widely misunderstood and underappreciated. The middlemen who perform these functions, moreover, tend to cultivate different skills and attitudes than the rest of the population and arouse particularly virulent hostility and discrimination. As a result, these groups have been obliged to develop unusually adroit survival skills (pp. 27-35). Migrations and Cultures is both a catalogue of those skills and an account of how the six groups have deployed them as minorities in societies across the globe.

Drawing on an impressive array of secondary sources ranging widely over time and space, Sowell traces each group's dispersion around the world and describes the patterns of family, communal and religious life, occupations, economic activity, political participation, and institution building that the groups' members have exhibited in the diverse nations and regions in which they have settled.(8)

All six groups have been economically successful in their destination countries.(9) Indeed, they have usually become more successful than the native populations with whom they had to compete there, despite daunting initial disadvantages and continuing barriers.(10) Their successes, however, were invariably hard won and took considerable time to consolidate. What makes their progress even more extraordinary is the fact that in almost every case, certain personal attributes that the groups brought to the destination country, or the social conditions that they encountered there, posed enormous obstacles to their progress, or even survival. The list of disadvantages is long: abject poverty and lack of skills,(11) ignorance of the native language, racial difference, disease, ethnic insularity, harsh discrimination and sometimes violence at the hands of the native population, limited opportunities to marry and form families, and political exclusion. Often, moreover, they were also greeted by unpromising material and economic conditions, sometimes even less propitious than the ones from which they had so desperately fled. In some cases, as with the Black Sea Germans, the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe, and the Indians in some African regions, the newcomers' economic vitality generated bitter hostility from the native populations, forcing them to remigrate. Although obliged to start over with many of the same disadvantages that they encountered in their earlier migrations, these groups nevertheless managed to replicate and even enlarge their success.

Sowell hopes to explain why these remarkable records of accomplishment against long odds are so consistent within and, to some extent, across these groups.(12) As a methodological matter, the global context of his study provides a provocative setting in which to draw explanatory inferences. First, the six groups differed enormously from one another with respect to race, language, religion, and other demographic variables, even including the gender ratio of their migrating populations.(13)

Second, some of the countries of origin generated remarkably diverse intragroup migrations. The Indian migrants, for example. included Gujaratis who went primarily to Africa, Guyana, and Fiji where they have dominated commerce; Tamils who settled in Malaya and Ceylon where most worked as laborers; Chettyars who went to other parts of Asia where they often dominated the moneylending business; and Jains who took their diamond industry skills overseas (pp. 311-12, 367 68).

Third, the groups' countries of origin were very different in terms of their geophysical features -- climate, soil, terrain, water supply. The migrants had adapted to these features in their countries of origin by adopting patterns of occupation, agricultural practice, community life, diet, and dress that were peculiarly suited to those countries. But the diversity among migrants in their original conditions and cultures went well beyond the differences among the countries from which they came. Even within countries of origin -- especially the immense land masses of China and India but also within the smaller ones of Italy, Germany, and Japan -- localities exhibited their own distinctive geophysical conditions and cultural patterns. Migrants from those localities brought those further variations with them to their new homes. As migrant streams often flowed disproportionately from particular localities within each country of origin,(14) the migrants transplanted these intragroup differences to the destination country.

Fourth, the destinations of the six groups differed. All of the groups sent sizable cohorts to the United States and Australia, and the groups overlapped to an extent in some other countries, but the six migration streams established their own distinctive axes.(15) Finally, the groups' migrations also occurred at different times,(16) were prompted by different historical circumstances, and were received differently by the native populations and by their governments.(17)

This striking heterogeneity in the geographical and demographic patterns of migration makes for an exceedingly complicated and potentially messy story. The great challenge for the analyst, then, is to extract from this welter of diversity some general truths about the determinants of the economic success and social integration of outsider groups. Sowell's methodological strategy is to exploit the fact, strongly established by his data, that some remarkable commonalities can be discerned within these evident differences. If these six groups, so heterogeneous vis-a-vis one another and internally, nevertheless managed to achieve so much...