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by qrendel
3676 days ago
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"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. |
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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?