@misc @Jonathanglick Right. I don't think framing a binary is very helpful. Harris Mylonis in his "Politics of Nation Building" helpfully divides nation-state strategies for managing subgroups between assimilation, accommodation, and restriction (the latter of which *in extremis* includes transfer or extermination).

There's a whole spectrum of degrees in mixing assimilation + accommodation, nearly all of which are better than restriction, or a binary of restriction or coerced assimilation. 1/

@misc @Jonathanglick The way I think of it is that accommodation is a *per se* good in a pluralistic, liberal society. We desire people to have the ability to live as much as they choose within any identities that they choose. But some degree of assimilation is functionally necessary, so trade-offs may need to be, and legitimately can be, made. 2/

@misc @Jonathanglick Better still is to encourage voluntary embrace of forms of identity that are sufficiently open that the tradeoffs are less urgent, people opt in to forms of identity that are open and don't hinder coordination across groups, as the nation-state requires. (This is the melting pot trick, in my view.) /fin