Sailer's Law of Immigrant Animosity

The more two immigrant groups hate each other back in the Old Country, the more they will crowd together in America.

You might think that when immigrants come to America, they would choose to spread out as far as possible from their fellow immigrants who are their arch-enemies back in the Old Country. For example, Eritreans and Ethiopians tend to hate each other (as do Ethiopia’s various constituent ethnicities such as the Tigrayans, Ahmaras, and Omoros), so you might think they’d fan out in vast America so that they wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves too much.

But instead, they tend to crowd into the exact same neighborhoods, such Uptown in Chicago, where I used to live.

For example, back in 1980, when I was getting an MBA at UCLA, my daily commute took me past the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Traffic was frequently slowed because a common sight were LAPD mounted police desperately holding back crowds of up to 10,000 angry Iranians on each of three corners. On one corner, would be the pro-Aytatollah / anti-Shah fundamentalists shaking their fists at the more fashionably dressed but equally enraged pro-Shah / anti-Ayatollah mob on the second corner. On the third corner, gesticulating fiercely but even-handedly at the two larger throngs, was a smaller contingent of Iranians who had the good taste to be mad at both the Ayatollah and the Shah (although God only knows whom they liked: Brezhnev?).

Why do people who loathe each other settle next to each other in America?

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