"What about the Italians?" is a mic-drop line in most debates over immigrant assimilation. But to a social scientist, there are no mic-drop lines, just chances to have Claude Code ask the General Social Survey about Scandinavian-American and Italian-American criminality:🧵

These are self-reports of whether a person has ever been arrested, convicted, or either in jail or prison. Ancestry is self-reported as well. Arrest question asked many times. "Scandinavians" includes Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. [Finns are Nordic but not Scandinavian.]

In the early 20C literature-- as with the 2010-era debate over Mexican-American crime-- age was alleged to be the only difference between Scandinavians and Italians, hiding their true equality, and artificially boosting Italian criminality. So I used age controls: same story.

I have no idea if Claude Code really ran the analyses I asked for or just hallucinated it all. But CC made a good faith effort to show me that yes, it did grab the true data. If this holds up, "What about the Italians?" will become a restrictionist talking point. ~fin~