[rayiner]

> (same thing in Germany where you have to pass a cultural test to gain citizenship, imagine such a thing in America! [And no, answering questions about the constitution, the foundational legal document, is not the same thing]).

I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, I kind of like that we're more liberal than Germany or France on this. I don't like how liberals in the U.S. fail to appreciate that fact and think the U.S. is super racist and xenophobic. (I guess if they're comparing against a platonic ideal.)

[tptacek]

This is a peeve of mine as well, but in the other direction: the American right is motivated by appeals to American exceptionalism, and should be hitting everyone over the head with how exceptional our citizenship law is. We have universal birthright citizenship! It's in the Constitution! That is an amazing thing that we should all be proud of.

(I acknowledge as well that the American left is motivated by appeals to transcending our history of racism, and agree with your implication that American antiracism is itself exceptional among nations of our global stature. You're right, we focus almost entirely on the negative, in the mistaken belief that only negative appeals will persuade.)

[rayiner]

Agreed.

[nitrogen]

Different parts of the US exemplify the full spectrum of tolerance to xenophobia. Our bests are pretty darn good (not near perfect), but the variance is high.

[nickff]

US law/regulatory policy may be a good measure, and is definitely less xenophobic than than of many/most European governments. The best example is what happens with refugees and immigrants, who are treated as interlopers in France; American policy is 'skeptical' of refugee claimants, but much more likely to permit them to settle and work if the claim is accepted.

[tptacek]

To say nothing of the fact that their children born in America are natural-born citizens of the United States, unlike almost every other similarly industrialized/wealthy country (the Maple Leaf State doesn't count!).

[rayiner]

As a brown guy with a beard, I’ve felt comfortable almost everywhere in the US I’ve been, including rural Illinois, Georgia, and Texas. In my experience, Americans are very uniformly warm and welcoming. Sydney I felt less welcome.

[pen2l]

Yeah but come on (I fear I may be verging on no true scotsman territory here, but...) you're not culturally a brown guy, I doubt you even have a non-American accent (do you?).

I'm an American brown guy but I've often felt like an outsider. Having traveled quite a bit, some experiences that stick out in Germany and Iceland is random folks casually starting conversations with me, I struggle to recall this happening to me in America.

[Chris2048]

What does liberal mean? Surely it depends what's on the test - "culture" could mean anything.

Take a liberal policy (no guns, no death penalty etc) - now test people who fail to adopt those cultural values; are you less liberal for testing people, or more liberal for testing them on liberal values? Seems like one word is being used to describe multivariate dimensions.

In this case the opposite of not having these kinds of tests are racism/xenophobia, because you implied not having them would be a counterpoint to such a reputation.

TBH, I think people cling too much to ideals and maxims to avoid the complexity of reality, then something happens, reality catches up, the maxim weakens, and the pendulum swings the other way. It's easily possible to be too (or naively) liberal, there are many examples of this e.g the existence of an Italian mafia dismissed as anti-migrant xenophobia - until the FBI proved they existed; anyone who dismisses such issues as "price worth paying (for liberty)" has no plan, and quickly find many of their countrymen disagree. The truth is, culture needs to adapt to environment, and if society doesn't do that by conscious design, it'll happen anyway through social economics.

The truth is, multiculturalism is a massive generalisation over "cultures" that suggests we might all get along, if X, and without losing individual group cultural identity - truth is, not all cultures are alike, not all values are beneficial, and even the multiculturalism has implicit maxims that make it a kind of culture in itself; How can you tolerate the intolerant? How can you promote freedom, and avoid Eurocentrism, if freedom is a Eurocentric value (or at least, the source of you definition of "freedom").