[ta_vf7xjd34cc]

There is an anecdote that is often used in India about how the Parsis (Zoroastrians who escaped the Islamic conquest of Persia) came to India and assimilated into the society.

When a group of Parsis landed in Gujarat (Western India), the local chieftain posed a question to the leader of the group in the form of a glass of milk. The leader responded by adding a spoon of sugar to the glass and stirring the contents. The answer was found to be acceptable and the Parsis, the tiniest of the minorities, continue to live and prosper in India to this day.

Would they have managed this if the leader had smashed the glass, danced on the fragments, and then taken a hammer to the face of the principal deity at the local temple?

Immigration wiped out Native American tribes, and many other peoples, because the people who immigrated were different and were in no mood to assimilate. Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.

A father who wonders if his daughter will be stabbed in school today may not vocalize such sentiment, but when the time to cast a vote comes, that vote will go to Geert Wilders.

[aegypti]

30,000 years worth of missing genetic immunity to essentially every disease imaginable wiped out native populations in the Americas and precipitated the collapse of civilizations there, actually.

[coldtea]

Funny how the millions directly enslaved and slaughtered didn't matter.

[s1artibartfast]

That's irrelevant. The point of the story, if you missed it, is that Europeans were not interested in adopting the Native American way of life and assimilating.

Cortez didn't arrive in Mexico and swear loyalty to the local king, and adopt their religion

[chewz]

It is relevant as most migrations in Eurasia for centuries were not of replacement but of assimilation kind.

[singleshot_]

Another point of the story is that new populations are either going to assimilate (which could be great for the pre-existing population) or they aren’t going to assimilate (which could be pretty bad for the pre-existing population).

[aegypti]

Cortes’s expedition of literal conquerors arrived by fighting for their lives the moment they met a state, let alone an empire.

Europe and its institutions failing to incorporate wildly conservative religious citizens has a lot more historicity than attributing “immigration” to the implication of native tribes in a post-apocalyptic pre-USA (it’s never Mexico or Peru) being culturally, physically, and biologically colonized.

[Zetobal]

Because wildly conservative religious people tend to abuse their religion to push their personal agenda. Hell you could say some candidates are pondering to them BECAUSE they know they are easily manipulated without upholding the core of their religion.

[pasabagi]

Calling the European conquest of the Americas 'immigration' is kind of like calling operation Barbarossa 'tourism'.

I also think the anecdote is kind of ridiculous. There was no India when the Parsis arrived. There was no India for a millennia after the Parsis arrived. The whole concept of assimilation to 'Indian culture' is even more ridiculous than it is to vastly more uniform (and vastly smaller) european cultures, because India, to its credit, is composed of hundreds of distinct cultures. Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.

[coldtea]

>Especially if you are going to backproject India (a country founded in 1947) to 700 ad.

Ah, the idea that a nation couldn't possibly exist until it got modern statehood (as opposed to being "a country founded in 1947") or is just a perfectly homogeneous blob (as opposed to "composed of hundreds of distinct cultures".)

Sorry, but neither are requirements for there to have been an India - or China, or any other such examples, for millenia. They first is just the modern form of statehood that emerged after the era of nationalist.

India was a nation way before 1947 and before the brits got the fuck out. And I'd argue was also a country, just one under occupation, as opposed to a sovereign one with externally recognized statehood status.

So there's that.

And if "the European conquest of the Americas" isn't exactly immigration, the European settlements in the country we now call US were called and described as exactly that, of innocent "pilgrims" and "persecuted minorities" too. Still they didn't do the native "indian" populations any favor.

[snakeyjake]

>Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.

The US faced this about 200 years ago.

A bunch of dirty, disease-ridden, rapey, religious extremists started invading the US, fleeing from the hellhole country they came from and running amok in the US.

They threatened the very fabric of US society with their criminality and the insular nature of their culture which saw them clustering in tenements that were overrun by disease and crime.

Many, if not most, Americans considered the recently-freed slaves to be a nobler and harder working part of the human species and held their coin purses and daughters closely whenever an Irishman was spotted.

Is the same thing happening in Europe?

[aprilthird2021]

I grew up hearing this story (it's famous in India), but it's not applicable to the current immigration crisis in Europe / US.

For one thing, the Parsis were lobbying to be allowed in. Europe and US are in need of immigrants due to shrinking, aging populations as their populations stop having kids. Their economies require a working class that they need to import. So immigration bans aren't really an option. And because the immigrants have some leverage in this situation they don't have to lobby like the Parsis did.

In the other case: refugees. This is a policy Europe and the US (and by extension the rest of the world adopted due to their negligence in WWII and the need to resolve that conflict post-war. It's another situation where the immigrants / refugees have the leverage and do not need to lobby. The US and Europe could revoke this policy, but they will suffer in the world if they do.

In contrast, the Parsis and the king in whose kingdom they moved to did not have this backdrop, and there was no need to take them in nor any pre-accepted agreement to amend. Additionally imagine if the Parsis had, 3 or 4 centuries later become a "problem" population in India in spite of the story. It's not as if that story alone kept the entire community from ever committing crimes or otherwise changing the fabric of society. In that scenario, it would not be possible to then remove them once they have moved there for generations. The same thing is true in Europe and North America.