| >and you probably don't want me, a filthy American, living in Belgium Some of the migrants I found most eager to integrate were all americans. They did so in a short time too.
Some of the most succesfull whilst also being visually and culturally distinct were (south) east asians who form a small spread out subsection of migrants. >Your government does not know how to integrate foreigners. It doesn't try to. Everything but.
Hell we have major leftists parties advertising in arab and turkish.
They also have a revolving door of scandals where they find out one of their migrant politicians has extremely problematic viewpoints.
Hell we have some that left to join foreign politics after doing their vote gathering job for erdogan or the like here. Some decade or 2 ago the prominent promise was that migrants would assimilate. To say they would not was labled biggoted. After all smaller italian migration had mostly done so.
Now the progressive script on this matter has switched around completely and the expectation of assimilation is considered biggoted. I think that says something about those progresives in question. > In contrast, America's relatively liberalized immigration policy means we're taking in migrants from all walks of life. It selects for richer migrants among other things even just by virtue of having a rather big pond to cross and an airport that doesn't let one sidestep the migration selection system to get trough. On a sidenote I remember a similar discussion with a canadian stating they also had a ton of moroccan migrants around the same time and those have done very well.
Somehow managing to not take note of the fact that the vast majority of their moroccan diaspora is somehow part of that small subsection of morocco that was jewish. >America used to have an extremely racist and restrictive immigration policy. This was only undone about 50 years ago. It also assimilated well since it had a strong focus on it's big cultural sphere, a lot of nationalism and considered being a hyphenated american to be something non aspirational and even derogatory. Belgium doesn't have a big cultural sphere, it's the least nationalist country you can potentially think of so there's no way to cloak oneself in that way and many consider themselves [insert other nationality] or muslim first and belgian/flemish second. >The immigration policy most countries in Europe has is tailored specifically for bringing in temporary workers that can be dismissed as will[2]. Them being guest workers was an initial excuse to make it palpatable to the populace when they were brought in to lower wages, take shit working conditions and combat unionization. In reality there's no dismissing at wil. There's no framework that sends them back. >This naturally triggered a crime wave, followed by a white backlash that resulted in the nadir of American race relations and the passage of those racist policies. What racist policies and what nadir of american race relations?
If I think nadir of american race relations i think red summer or LA riots. Never of anything involving italians or irish. From what I remember learning the supposed differing perception of the irish and italians in the US has been massively inflated/overstate in recent decades since it fits a certain perspective. They're also not exactly that easy to discern from other groups. They're white and the perception that they were a different "race" was extremely fringe even if one likes to put the exceptions to that in the spotlight today and rather different than the differentiation from WASP in-group stuff. A similarly weird retroactive progressive view is the noble savage stuff regarding native americans.
A tribe that genocided another and has inhabbited a state far less continuously than let's say flemish in belgium gets uplifted by what is pretty much blood and soil rethoric of cultural and historic ties to the land and nature. >To make matters worse, this property is self-perpetuating. A random immigrant from one of these countries will fall back upon their local diaspora population for support. In America that means making friends with people from all walks of life. In Germany that means joining an illegal far-right[1] Turkish biker gang. In the US increasingly this kind of super large differentiated diaspora doesn't quite exist to the same extent except maybe for "african americans" as a wider group. Even chinese americans are only about 6mil if i remember well. You have places where ethnicities are very much concentrated and you see similar things happening but they're a tiny part of the country as a whole. >As a European you are probably arguing that America does not have cities because of our comically awful public transportation networks. I can't see why that would be and have never met a european that thought that. >In case this isn't obvious: the Muslims taking over your country are just as worried about western culture taking over theirs. yes americanisation/westernisation happens there as much as here.
But I dare say there is a key difference in that there are no westerners moving to their countries en mass and going as far as excluding locals from housing and jobs in local administrations they take over with sectarian voting.
I would bet money if that was the case it would fairly commonly be equated to or flat out called colonialism. There's far less sub saharan africans who settle in morocco on the other hand and they do make it a political issue.
Similarly the racism of my saudi ex's family (in SA to be clear) would make our far right blush and similar can be said about the takes of some turkish friends about syrians, armenians, etc whilst they're otherwise ironically very pro migration and either progresive or ...progressive anti-religious ultranationalist. Funilly enough outside of those ethnicities they had conflicts with I've found Turkish inclusive ultranationalism to have been similarly effictive as the american flavour of the past.
I know second generation people there of ethnicities from russia, central asia and the middle east who see themselves very very much as Turks. In typical western european fashion I used to be very opposed to nationalism in this way and other ways but this and other experiences have kind of flipped my script. PS: At the end of the day if non eu migrants are on average a net financial drain to a densely populated country then most argumets for it still just fall apart. Any argument that does push some perceived benefit seems to shatter on the fact that it depends on a system of eternal migration and population growth.
The kind of stuff that would end up vindicating the replacement conspiracy theories. |