[jerf]

"I'd rather accept refugees and put the effort into successfully integrating them in Western culture."

We can't. Western culture has decided Western culture is toxic and asking others to conform to it for any reason is imperialistic, racist, and xenophobic.

Until Western culture stops the virtue signaling competition to see who can slag their own culture harder than the next person, and acquires even minimal self-confidence, there will be no assimilation possible.

"Another big problem is the xenophobic and racist attitudes towards immigrants,"

But is that cause or effect? Immediately after you basically state that these immigrants are not assimilated into Western culture, you complain that some members of the Western culture don't want to live next to them. How do you expect to "successfully integrate" people even as you just told them about how the culture you expect to integrate them into is xenophobic and racist against them and everything else? Would you integrate into a culture constantly telling you how much it sucks and how it's wrong about everything and how sorry it is to you about that?

[qrendel]

"Successfully integrate" = "live peacefully in this country under a single government and set of laws," not force them to abandon their culture. Stuff about making immigrants abandon their religion, outlawing their traditional dress, forcing them to shake hands, whatever, is (imo) disgusting and not what I mean by "cultural integration." That stuff will work itself out over time by regular culture processes and a two-way exchange, the same as it did for all the previous immigrant groups (Catholics, Irish, Chinese, Africans, etc). No, things still aren't perfect, but over time things do become more integrated just through natural processes.

> Would you integrate into a culture constantly telling you how much it sucks and how it's wrong about everything and how sorry it is to you about that?

The people acting that way (e.g. Donald Trump) are not helping. They're an obstacle. They're making things worse for everyone. There would need to be strategies to mitigate that, finding ways to convince them to be more accepting of immigrants, or reducing contact with the most hostile people as much as possible. But I still think allowing immigration, and having programs to facilitate it, is a better strategy than what has been happening so far, despite the obstacles.

[jerf]

'"live peacefully in this country under a single government and set of laws," not force them to abandon their culture.'

Government and laws are culture. They aren't all of a culture, but they are culture.

May I assume, for instance, that one of the laws you'd like to see them adopt is equal treatment of women? For the specific set of immigrants in question, that is a major abandonment of culture. Do the immigrants have a responsibility to culturally integrate here or not?

"The people acting that way (e.g. Donald Trump) are not helping."

Could you find me, say, five quotes where Donald Trump tells other cultures of the world than ours is racist, sexist, xenophobic, and toxic, or where he apologizes for all the things that Western culture has done?

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here by guessing you don't like Trump. Isn't exactly the reason you don't like him precisely that he doesn't do those things, like all proper public figures do?

Actually, never mind, I don't really care about how you feel about Trump, I just needed some textual distance before this paragraph. A few paragraphs ago I asked you if immigrants have a responsibility to culturally integrate or not. I'm also not too worried about the answer to that either. My point is, did you notice how that made you feel? I bet you find you didn't want to answer that question. You certainly didn't want to answer it with a resounding "Yes, immigrants absolutely should conform to basic Western standards of how women should be treated equally." I bet there's a part of you that wants to just go ahead and copy and paste that into a reply, just to show me.... but there's another part of you already writing the "but ...". And that's the proof of what I'm saying here... that sort of confidence is not in our culture. You don't need to go out into the culture to find this truth, you merely need look honestly inside yourself. How is that culture supposed to assimilate anything?

[ef4]

> there will be no assimilation possible.

While I can't speak for Europe, in America there are approximately zero second-generation immigrants who aren't thoroughly Americanized.

[mancerayder]

If by Americanized, you include become Native English speakers, then I'd have to disagree with that 0 number. There are huge swathes of NYC neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where second generation immigrants would be mistaken for first generation in most of the rest of the country.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that we're not so superior to Europeans with regards to integration as we think we are. I think we tend to care less. Of all the xenophobic stuff some of our politicians say, I don't notice the word integration come up a lot.