Countries with jus soli citizenship and separation of religion and state are more capable of integrating and assimilating people of 1) similar religion and 2) similar skin color.
Such worked to the advantage of Lebanese Christians who moved from the Ottoman Empire to American countries such as Brazil. Brazil, which once emphasized a “Blanqueamento” policy of “whitening” the population through subsidized European migration, has the largest Arab population outside of the Arab World, with a Lebanese-descended population larger than that of modern-day Lebanon itself.
Due to the lack of Jim Crow-style apartheid, Brazilian whiteness was made more expansive to include those “white enough” (and Christian enough) to be integrated. Masses of Mediterranean Christian Arabs fit the bill for Portuguese-descended Catholic Brazilians in a way that masses of Mediterranean Muslim Arabs or even the long-resident descendants of African slaves could not.
It took longer for the historically-Protestant United States to fully welcome Catholics, let alone Catholics who were a darker shade of “White”, into the U.S. melting pot. The latter still face a great deal of hostility.
This has me wondering if, in a pluralistic society, it’s not enough to merely have 1) separation of religion and state + 2) jus soli citizenship. Those principles already allow for whiteness in countries like Brazil and the U.S. to be more expansive than they’ve been in the past, but not enough to reduce hostility against people from non-Christian or majority-darker-skinned societies.
More open policies for putting government above the privileges of skin color and religion would allow for better social integration of immigrants.
