My understanding is that pre-WW2 Europe you had community groups that dealt with their people. So in a Jewish neighborhood, you had powerful Rabbis or other religious leaders that dole out law. These unofficial community leaders were given a lot of autonomy as to how to deal with their subjects. You see hints of that today in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you have un-offical private police [0]. I don't think its as simple as saying they were excluded or ghettoized.
But that begs the question, what does it mean to be a country? Some people think its just magical land, like you step onto the country, get a piece of paper that says you're from that country and that's it. I think every country has a cultural identity. Much less so for America, since its the only country I know of where you can call yourself American despite not being born there or have any blood relatives from there but no one would bat an eye. But even there, some things are anti-American. Things like women being second class citizens (e.g. women can't drive or are forced to cover up). Or lawlessness (e.g. riding illegal scooters the wrong way down the street).
I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If you want to treat women like second class citizens or don't have respect for private policy or rule of law, you shouldn't be allowed to come to law abiding Western country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/nyregion/brooklyns-privat...
>> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there
But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough.
And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.
In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.
This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.
Why do you think people move to America? It’s partly because it’s the ~only country where it’s reliably possible to move up if you work hard enough.
America is totally a place where a hardworking, intelligent immigrant can become fairly wealthy (assuming no catastrophic bad luck, ie. getting shot because the second amendment says that everyone should have a full-auto assault rifle), but it does not have a monopoly on that :)
Germany is not a land of opportunity, it is a land of relative comfort, with laws and regulations in place to protect the lives of German boomers. Immigrants will never go far in Germany, but they will be relatively comfortable.
The quick answer is "very little".
In this index, the Nordic countries are up top, and the US down at number 27.
A lot of people move to the US because it’s a large and very rich country, with very effective propaganda.
There’s a reason people do their startups in the US, there’s a reason the smart Nords move to the US rather than the other way around. There’s a reason Y Combinator is American.
I encourage you to try innovating in Europe (or just the Nordic countries). Please prove me wrong, for the sake of Europe.
To be fair, it’s certainly not _impossible_ to move up, but it’s relatively much harder, which is the point.
I don't think it is controversial at all to say that the US has much higher economic mobility than Europe.
Uh. I want to hope that this is just a oversimplification intended to get a reaction.
Yes, US does have real issues that it needs to address those in order to make social mobility reasonably attainable. Arguably, it is a lot harder to "make it" now.
I am just an anecdote here, but, I am a first generation immigrant. I have a house, a dog and a partner. Also next week, I am taking my vacation and buying a vette ( well, I scheduled a test drive -- didn't mentally commit to buying yet ). I do not consider myself a second class citizen. I am not rich, but I can't say I am poor either. My kid is starting school ( private, public one is not great here -- ok, but not great ).
I honestly do not think I would have been able to do the same in the old country.
I absolutely accept that I might not be the norm and the current version of capitalism needs to be reined in, but, honestly, if you do want to drive that point, I think you need a better argument.
disagree with this as a French person.
That "ethnic nationalist core" is the French equivalent of Trump supporters who say "America is a white (anglo) Christian nation".
the country currently known as France was originally Celtic Gaul, which was then conquered by Romans, then by various Germanic tribes, most notably the Franks who gave the country it's current name, and didn't really unify until fairly late. Even to this day, you'll find people in Brittany identify more as 'Breton' then French sometimes, despite the efforts of the French state to kill that local identity in the late 19th century. We're a nation of bastards, and always have been.
You'll have sad, sorry people on the far right who conjure up some imaginary ideal of a "true, ethnic French character", but it's like the KKK members in America talking about being 'true Americans'. It's a fallacy.
The people with high levels of melanin with parents that arrived in the country less than 50 years ago playing for our national soccer team are, at least to my mind, just as French as my father whose family lived around Saint-Etienne for the past 300+ years, even if some of them act like the equivalent of "that girl from Jersey shore saying she's Italian because her last name is Spaghetti despite not actually speaking a word of Italian and having never been there" sometimes. :)
If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world.
The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey.
Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled.
Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.
So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.
You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)
> scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago
Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. Any general sentiment from that time period is lost, and the best your scholar can do is project the lens of the present onto sources from the past. To be fair, all histories are done that way.
But yes, Jews were often moneylenders because there were no other options available and that niche was conveniently not open to Christians.
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...
What you are doing is "affirming the consequent". Most Jews were working normal jobs (obviously excluding the ones they were legally barred) like everyone else.
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.
Funnily enough it's not even that hard to 'become aware'. Start with the Wikipedia page on the Second World War, for instance, for a blockbuster entry to the topic.
The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews (with the Romani a close second). Pretty much every European power has evicted, massacred, initiated pogroms, or otherwise persecuted Jews. The trend continues today.
Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic, because that's denying a group of people their homeland or Urheimat. That is classic genocide, by the way.
Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.
It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
That is not what I said; this is a strawman. I said, 'Jewish people deserve sovereignty over their ancestral homeland' (i.e. Zionism). This is completely orthogonal to 'Israel represents all Jewish people'.
That being said...
> It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
I don't think that's crackpot at all. What's wrong with an ethnic state representing its people's and diaspora's interests? Why do you think countries today issue their citizens with passports? Why do some countries give even non-citizens a fast-track path to citizenship or at least an indefinite multiple-entry visa, provided they're of a certain ethnicity?
A plurality of countries today are ethnic states, by the way, including essentially every European state. I am very happy to say that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany absolutely represent Germans as a whole.
As an addendum: printed on the inside front cover of my A1 German textbook was a map of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Make of that what you will.
Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.
Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.
In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.
okay I'm Jewish, and I think you're over-simplifiying when you say
> Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic
For example, you can find here: https://tsedek.fr/
a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here: https://arielche.net/Lydie.html ) but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".
Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.
I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.
> because that's denying a group of people their homeland
History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.
I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.
That seems like a bizarre claim... If anything the attacks, discrimination etc. would have encouraged assimilation. Voluntary conversion to Christianity wasn't particularly uncommon either (forced violent conversion also occurred). Even when national governments started expelling their entire Jewish populations staying and getting to keep all of your property ussually was an option. Yet most chose to leave rather than convert.
Yes, converted Jews might have faced discrimination and even violence (this depended a lot on the willingness to abandon your old customs and practices and varied hugely based on time and place, but seemingly became a bigger issue at the very end of the middle ages) but ussually they managed to more or less fully assimilate in a few generations.
But contrast that with, for instance, Kaifeng[0]. The biggest fear of Jewish believers is that they will encounter a society like America or China which swallows their talents whole and integrates them fully.
Put another way, it is a fear right now in segments of the Jewish community that without antisemitism, Jews would cease to exist. And there is a truth to this borne out by history. In Jewish communities it is practically taken for granted that if we had been treated equally, most of us would have given up our identity ages ago.
Have you considered that perhaps if the idea of integration itself is considered abhorrent by a culture then that culture will very rarely be accepted anywhere?
Or to put it another way: if everywhere one goes smells like feces, maybe one should check their own boots
They want the benefits of being part of the community without being part of the community
For an example, take a look at the history of the Cagots in France, who were (are) ethnically identical to other French but due to their psychological treatment and ostracizatìon were forced into tight communities for survival.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot
This can happen to any arbitrary group of people sufficiently singled out for any reason. A similar case exists in Japan. Then if that group remains together for fear of the abuse they receive, the broader population says "they want to be separate".
Also, your shit on boots metaphor is highly offensive, but I'm answering you as if you aren't a bigot. Sometimes the reason people end up as bigots is that no one treated them with respect and gave them complete answers.
What do we call anonymous stories, lacking in detail, being circulated in a public forum? Yes, those are rumors.
As a sidenote: you're saying I lied to spread rumors ?
Are you scared of definitions? Do you feel like dictionaries are written to gaslight you? Don't blow it out of proportion.
- origin: me
- spread by word of mouth: no
In either case, "it's not racism, you don't know what they're like" completes my bingo card.
Do you like violent drug gangs? If not, why? Are you racist to them?
This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.
> You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.
Do you have a citation for that?
Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.
So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.
I also never felt any issue regarding Jewish people but considering this was after ww2 .. nobody would really say a thing either, but personally they never displayed anything noteworthy society wise. another non issue
Now it's African, northern African populations being at the forefront of news, but personally i had many more issues with them (and i'm partially brown so the chances of them thinking I'm too different are lower). regularly they displayed very low morals, aggressiveness, sudden high fanaticism toward religious principles they didn't really grasp, worse behavior in school.
My mother knew people from Asia (Vietnamese, Cambodians) fleeing from war, with no resources, not speaking french, nothing in common with Europe, they mentioned seeing some racism, yet they too ended up being a non issue. They end up being as the cliche quiet-asian-1st-in-class kid and that's the end of it.
It's possible France or other European countries have some underlying, hard to describe, notion of integration. It's less economical and more about mentality ? Maybe except UK, where it's often said that anybody will to work would rapidly integrate. I still can't say.
I would strongly recommend the following essay, which I read in an ethics class and found extremely powerful. The essay argues that humans can relatively easily be persuaded or intimidated into helping murder other humans, as long as they are introduced to it in the “correct” way. So we should understand what that way is and be vigilant against it.
Destroying the innocent with a clear conscience: A sociopsychology of the Holocaust
John P Sabini, Maury Silver Survivors, victims, and perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, 329-358, 1980
That being said, you can't practice Christianity or Judaism openly in Saudi Arabia to this day. Looking at it from Mecca, the point of origin of the Caliphates, to their furthest extent into Europe in Spain (or the Balkans) you can still see the traces of extremist religious bans existing on both sides. Jews tend to get caught in the middle and slaughtered at each turn, as they need to seek accommodations with whichever larger religion is in power in order to survive, and then are seen as enemies by the other one.
All this is written on the streets and buildings of Granada, Spain, where ancient Jewish stars adorn old buildings where there are no Jews, where the oldest church was once a mosque, and the Alhambra, symbol of the Caliphate and its civilization, is the largest tourist attraction in Europe... where the markets sell everything Arabic yet the day to day interaction of Muslims and Christians is fraught, each understanding very well their own history in the place. And where it is very, very strange to be one of the only Jews... with both Christians and Muslims hating you and claiming to protect you.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Would someone need to exclusively repress Jews for that repression to meaningfully affect Jews' economic and human rights trajectory?
That sounds as a very weak perspective to start with. That is, what if "they" are not "innocent"? There is definitely a standard out there that will allow to judge us as guilty of some heretic behavior, whoever we are.
Surely it would not be very wise to judge a book by its title, though.
https://www.nytimes.com/1968/12/17/archives/1492-ban-on-jews...
Which Jews? Ultraorthodox don't integrate very well in Israel, for instance.
The Haredi (ultraorthodox) movement itself is a reaction to urban Jews who wished to assimilate when such a thing became conceivable in the 19th C. And this is a ghetto mentality. In American terms, your question would be equivalent to "which Black people?" Implying that people who claim and cling to ghetto culture have a hard time integrating. But that 1. dismisses the role that ghettoization had on creating a subculture in the first place, and then 2. pretends the subculture itself is the reason for failure to integrate, i.e. that it's the cause rather than the effect, and 3. serves to allow and excuse and justify the mainstream of society projecting their negative perceptions of that subculture onto individual members of the same ethnic group who would like to integrate without completely renouncing their unique heritage. And in the Jewish case, even complete renunciation wasn't enough, so perhaps the ghetto culture had a point.
I take your point though. Even nominally homgenous societies will stratify and have out-groups.
I will speak from the perspective of one who emigrated to the US.
Every new group is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" may find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.
Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.
In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, East Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth? Why hasn't this happened to the Somalians mentioned elsewhere? The Muslims of Dearborn?
Or look at Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class <http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>. Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain. But the outcomes are completely different.
I will ask you the same question you posed. Are these differences in outcome the groups' fault? Or the host society's fault?
Community under assault will redirect its private efforts to security which then undermines cultural and economic development and slows down formation of human capital. That's because security needs are fundamental and trump cultural and economic development [1].
Regarding Indian Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, I disagree they are indistinguishable for outsiders. Typically, anybody who cares can tell by the name, place where they live, or even just the job they do.
It is only recently that some white Brits may have started clueing on to this. While these trends were emerging, this was definitely not the case.
And even now, it very often is not the case. To give an example, plenty of Brits from Pakistani muslim backgrounds have names and surnames that <1% of white Brits could place as being of that background. This isn't rare at all, unlike e.g. Arab names that indeed most can tell apart.
W/r/t the failure of the US toward Black people, I completely agree with the sibling comment by user:avz and would have nothing more to add.
Doesn't that presuppose the conclusion? That such emigrants should be received regardless of how fundamentally different their hard drives' formatting is? Why should that be?
If South Korea did not have strong familial and ethnic ties with North Koreans, it would never accept any NK defectors at all, and said differences in software would a big reason why. Heck, one can imagine the South putting up walls to prevent a large-scale influx of North Koreans after the Pyongyang regime collapses.
But I'm not talking about what they want (whatever South Korea says they want about reunification). I mean what preparations are they making for absorbing that mass of people in the event that it happens... in particular, turning them from a faceless mass into prosperous and contributing individual members of a modern westernized society. South Korea has put a lot of study into that question, as did West Germany. So why can't France? They did control a good portion of the Muslim world for a couple of centuries, after all. What's the difference between the potential collapse of Algeria and the collapse of NK, or at least what is the plan for it?
No one wanted civil wars in Syria and Libya that would send millions of refugees to Europe, but there has been no systematic approach to integrating them and, let's say, updating their software. The prevailing view seems to be that this is temporary rather than just a fraction of what is to come. Anyone looking at the demographics can see that if Europe fails to inculcate its Enlightenment values into its immigrant population within a generation, those values will cease to exist. So I mean what is the real plan?
They ruled Algeria for about 130 years, and Tunisia and Morocco for less than half that. Syria and Lebanon for a measly 26 years. That's barely a blip in historical terms. Plus some bits of West Africa with Muslim populations. That hardly counts as "a good portion of the Muslim world."
So it's rather decades here, not centuries. And more like "strategic chunks", instead of "good portion". Let's not conflate limited colonial holdings with some kind of vast Islamic empire under French rule.
Yes. And even after the institutionalized racism was banned in various forms, the social system of racism continues to this day in the form of lower wages for the same jobs, less chance of hiring or buying a home with the same qualifications.
What I am saying is that this is the indigenous European attitude toward migrants, and it is creating generations of ghettoized people who no longer believe they can integrate, just as generations of Black people in America gave up on integration, seeing that they were still kept out on a daily basis even after having achieved legal equality.
Neither is "Punjabi", "Gujarati", or "Pahari" which are most South Asians in the UK.
I'm South Asian American with family in Europe, and in all honestly Asians in Europe aren't as well integrated because of Europeans.
The US and Canada is nowhere as passive aggressively racist as Europe is (well, Massachusetts is very similar in it's attitude).
In much of North America, there is still buy-in for the "Horatio Alger" story and communities are fairly used to immigrants.
Can you explain in what way did this manifest in Sweden for instance? Or have any data/evidence besides some semi-vague claims about antisemitism and some immutable characteristics of European societies (which are hardly monolithic to begin with).
It's not that I even necessarily disagree with what you're saying but unfortunately your comment is 80% demagoguery and 20% substance.
> Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
Possible different population samples that don't overlap as much? By and large (unless you're crossing the Mexican border I guess...) immigrating to the US has been significantly harder than to the EU even if you're educated/relatively high skilled. The US can afford to be much more picky.
> One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
There are 2x more Jews in France than before WW2? Guess from where most of the threats/attacks towards them are coming? (hint: not the host society).
What gives me a bit of hope is that this seem to be quite rapidly changing, at least in part of society. I have been working at a company in central Stockholm where none! of about 100 employees had even immigrated parents. I’m working in a large company right now where some departments still are 100% native Swedes, but other, that see what a waste it is to not use all this talent, employ 50% or more first or second generation of immigrants.
The welfare system doesn't work well with integration either. If all that is available to you are bad jobs due to your lack of job market / language skills, why work if welfare pays almost the same?
I think Sweden does a decent job integrating those migrants who arrive with sufficient skills for the job market. It's the rest that are problematic, and they would probably do better in the US with its lack of welfare state.
Tbh I doubt it. If it's anything like German society, which is incredibly insular, just being non-German is enough to make you unwelcome.
As a (technically) second generation migrant born and raised I doubt this. This is a sentiment mostly only shared by isolated liberal wing of the society, who probably don't really mingle with expat population beyond surface chatter.
And it's not just some racism sentiment but as the post you replied to insinuate, general xenophobic / supremacist sentiments. I even know other (white) Europeans with great education and jobs getting sick of this place because just how condescending and unfriendly people in general are, for petty things such as unperfect Swedish. (Native English speaking migrant being the only exception)
If you live in Sweden then you will also know that the state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...). These areas are then labeled as unsafe because of a slightly elevated crime rate and because they're labeled unsafe, swedes start moving out and quality of services and house prices drop and the downward spiral continues until the area becomes a ghetto even though they're usually not that bad.
Although SFI exists to teach Swedish to immigrants, the quality of the teaching is not great in most schools.
That's where the integration effort stops.
Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society. That's how you end up with people living in upscale parts of Stockholm for 10+ years and can barely form a sentence in Sweden.
No it doesn't. Refugees are placed in municipalities all over Sweden but most choose to move to the big cities as soon as they can and end up in these districts because they are the cheapest.
> slightly elevated crime rate.
Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
> That's where the integration effort stops.
Simply not true. There are oodles of integration efforts all over Sweden at many levels; public projects, local initiatives and on top of that immigration heavy areas gets more public funding than average for schools, after-school activities, park/street cleanings, etc.
> Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society.
That's because Swedish is a small language and most professionals don't plan on staying. Most Swedish professionals speak English on a native speaker level and most large Swedish companies has English as the official corporate language. In my experience most non-English speakers that comes to Sweden spend their efforts on becoming fully proficient in English while the English speakers are delighted to find that they can use English everywhere in society. Learning Swedish has a very low priority and after a couple of years most expats grows tired of the cold, darkness, taxes, low salaries, etc.
How to enforce that: fine whoever sells/rents to them outside where they are supposed to live. And threaten to deport them if they move without the years passing or showing they’ve integrated / learned the language / culture etc.
Obviously, exceptions can be made for reasons of safety or being closer to a job they got, but then the same procedure should be followed (spread out and surrounded by neighbors willing to help integrate them).
They should also have access to resource to accelerate the cultural integration, like meetups and schools etc.
If the immigrants enrich the community, those who welcomed them get the enrichment.
If the immigrants bring crime and disease, those who welcomes them get the crime, disease, and decreased property values.
I love solutions that work whether my views are right or wrong.
May I steal that for part of my political platform?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/abbott-texas-migrant-b...
It has had interesting consequences:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/nyregion/adams-deport-mig...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/nyregion/shelters-are-ove...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/nyregion/hotels-prices-mi...
Facebook and Uber and AirBNB did it in social networking and transportation and housing, respectively, starting in colleges and cities.
I am doing it for all kinds of things, and sometimes selling it to political campaigns such as I did with https://qbix.com/yang2020.pdf but that is not really my goal, just to help some politicians was never my goal
I put out a few apps like Groups on iOS and so far we attracted a million small community leaders in 100 countries, who have our app on their phones. So the first phase (bottom-up) is under way
I even launched blockchain applications worldwide, that are actually helpful: https://intercoin.org/applications
including working on launching a fund for refugees that will be crowdfunded by people worldwide: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688
Years I go I met with Rohingya Project guys and working together to create the R Coin, Identity and Academy on decentralized platform for the Rohingya refugees: https://rohingyaproject.com/platform/
Now this year for the first time, we got a VC (Balaji’s fund) leading our round for Network States. Balaji is a big proponent of these (kind of like Estonia’s e-residency), his fund also has Naval Ravikant, Fred Wilson and others on their investment commitee… basically a lot of people involved in Web3 (CoinBase, CoinList, etc.)
I’m going to Singapore on Sept 22nd for their conference to meet with Vitalik and others: https://balajis.com/p/network-state-conference
So if you’re serious about doing the first part of the solution (software) I recommend you can do it in software, and working on the ground with small towns and neighborhoods. I already have a platform doing just that, so if you want to do it locally, we can reach out about doing something together. We’re eventually looking to go to every part of the world, but currently we’re at a stage of just doing local pilots. Look at my profile and you can email me.
And/or come to the Singapore conference on September 22nd and let’s all meet and discuss there in person :)
But PS: our platform isn’t only about resettling refugees, although it is a big part. It’s about dating, job boards, local currencies, and much more. I think that if Donald Trump and Co get into office again, there will be a huge “crypto summer” but we need to use crypto for actual applications like the one I mentioned, with global donation crowdfunding and transparency and benefitting the stateless people on the ground, instead of crazy ponzi schemes round 4 LOL.
Citation needed? You haven't provided a single citation for any of the wild claims you've made.
It should be said that the pre-WW2 Jewish population of Sweden was miniscule, but that Swedes took great personal risks to save these refugees from a culture they did not know.
The rise in antisemitic attacks in France, conducted entirely by Muslim immigrants, is a feature of the weakness of the French pluralist/secularist and legal state which again appears to be failing to integrate new arrivals into its Enlightenment ideals. One hopes Sweden doesn't fall into the same trap. But my gripe is about integration, and historically Sweden has not had to deal with anything on the scale of what is happening now.
I agree that our social, educational and cultural institutions are doing an absolutely atrocious job of integrating immigrant populations.
Despite that, I find that most people I know from the Maghreb are actually quite well integrated, mostly because as an educated, well-to-do person I hang around with other educated, well-to-do people and they tend to be quite nice to get along with.
I grew up in Houston (arrived age 6, left just before my 18th birthday), and honestly I find the way 'native'/anglo Texans treat Mexicans (more properly, Hispanics, but over there everyone calls them Mexicans) to be probably slightly worse on average than the way French people treat people of African descent.
However, the French welfare state + my god our educational system is so fucked it's not even funny mean that it's possible to get certain pathological cases where an immigrant will move to France, live off the welfare state while railing against everything French (post-colonial hatred) and then use that sweet welfare money to plan and execute terrorist attacks.
I don't blame that one the innate character of French people though, just on badly designed social institutions. Our current welfare state was modified by well-meaning leftists who were aiming to make something more egalitarian, but instead made everything worse, and then modified by well-meaning neoliberals who were aiming to make something more efficient, but instead made everything worse, and now it's starting to look like a big ugly pile of legacy code written in Perl.
I'm not blaming the character of the French any more than the character of the Arabs, I just think the system is not built in a way like America where assimilation is the goal of either party.
Being educated helps a lot. Being wealthy helps a lot. Speaking English helps a lot. Being white helps a lot. Not having these attributes is not a deal-breaker (we DID manage to elect a black president), but they do significantly effect how someone and their children might be able to access the greater community, education, jobs, and more, and particularly outside of the immigrant community they might belong to. This is exacerbated by the state of our geography: America is big, and spread-out, and was built in its current form with an eye toward advantaging car-ownership and ethnic/economic segregation. It is possible to come to this country as someone who is not American, become American, and then become fabulously successful as an American, but it's not a given, and there are often headwinds.
It's a difficult problem. We shouldn't despair because our governments haven't been able to tackle it. It's one worth continuing to try at because the alternatives (terrorism and internecine violence on one end, a form of genocide on the other) are horrible.
At least no one can pretend that Larry was missing the skills to handle the job, Perl community neither laked dedication on par with the flowing resources, and what they build still make stand a significant part of the internet diligently.
thank you, your response made me laugh out loud <3
I think overall Germans, deep down, don't really want us here. We are here to pay for the pension bill—that's literally it. But since we are here, they want us to completely assimilate and give up everything about yourself that came from our homelands. There is no respect nor appreciation for any external culture, so your "differences" have negative value, because you have to Be German.
I dated a third generation Turkish German for 2 years whilst I lived here and she faced fairly casual racism from white Germans with a regularity that would be unthinkable in the UK. She was often getting complimented on how good her German (it's her mother tongue) was or asked about what country she came from (she was born and raised in Germany). It's a racist country. Don't believe the PR about how liberal Germany is—it's liberal if you're white and German.
And I say all this as a white Western European. It's going to be so much harder for the average Syrian or Afghan.
Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
In my 2500 souls german home village live people from more than 40 nations. I never heard negative comments about them from one of the natives. But the shithole you live in of course may vary.
> Continental Europeans have very bad experiences with British tourists
Funnily enough I've never been anywhere where our trashy British tourists go (why would I?). So actually I don't know what they're like, but I've heard very bad things. I've also heard even worse things about the Dutch, though.
> And I am quite sure I get support from around a 100 Million dead guys
Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead, so I am not sure they're in a position to support you at all. Having said that, I wonder what the all the dead Europeans and Jews murdered by Germans would think of Germany.
> But the shithole you live in of course may vary
I live and work in Hamburg.
>Turks are a very big community (I guess more than 20 Million counting all generations) in Germany with a lot of not well adapted folk.
Yes, because of how the majority ethnic German population treated them and continues to treat them. It's a very racist country. That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me. Thank you for the cultural exchange.
‘Cliched’: Turkish-Germans react as president brings kebab on Istanbul trip
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/24/cliched-turkis...
(Not trying to make a point, I just found the controversy kind of funny.)
You are calling me xenophobic and second the point I made? Are you mentally ill?
And btw, never heard anything worse or even comparable about the Dutch.
And btw 2, never about Scots, either.
> Well whoever they are that you're talking about, they are dead,
I guess you know very well who they are. The people killed in India by the British colonialism, according to the study of an US american institute. And yes, other monkeys are murderish assholes, too. Especially when the uniformism of the nation state mindset kicks in.
And you should discuss your argument that the dead cannot give support with the Jews.
> That's what living and working in Germany and falling in love with a Turkish German taught me.
I doubt your objectivism.
Reader: never let anyone tell you Germans aren't nationalistic. They are as nationalistic as anyone, they are simply more subtle about it and eschew overt symbolism.
>I doubt your objectivism.
Yes, to truly understand the racism of Germany, I have to witness someone who I do not give a shit about being victimised. If I care about that person, then it doesn't count and I am not allowed to form an opinion. Lol.
Is that really necessary? Also I'll second it, your comments are objectively xenophobic.
> never about Scots, either
Considering there are 10x less of them not particularly suprising...
> And yes, other monkeys are murderish assholes, too
Germans specifically (the British never even came close historically...). Or you won't say it?
No. Different from most apes, I have a clear picture of the positive and negative (and neutral) sides of the ethnics I know. Undisturbed by mental illnesses like racism and especially political correctness. Facts cannot be xenophobic.
> Germans specifically
IIRC, in WW2 around 60 Million died. That is less than the around 100 Million "murdered" Indians. But in less time, so the death rate is higher. Choose your metrics.
I have a funny story, my grandfather actually was German and fought for the Nazi German Empire in WW2 and moved to the UK afterwards. He used to cry about how much worse the English were and how unfair it all is that the Nazi German Empire (your Nazi ancestors) is vilified compared to the English. Will you bring up the Boer War now? He used to do that too. Anyway it's all very on brand for a German to give off pretty familiar national socialist vibes. Takes me right back to my childhood trying to navigate interactions with that autistic old man :')
Funnily enough, they do say that German society is like one where everyone is autistic. It all adds up!
Scots _are_ Brits.
Integration is hard - I recently went to an intergration event at a local church - almost no Germans there - and also the different foreign communities didn't really interact with each other. E.g. there's severe hatered between the different groups of Turkish people.
I think there are a lot of outsiders in German society - ethnic integration is hard. Maybe Special interest groups - like Computer Meetups or Maker-Spaces can help with Integration into a new Clan?!
Even though the Austrian girl had heavy accent and technically being the migrant, her "germanic" name and white face gave her access to the most basic thing:housing; something a German born Iranian (studying engineering, well educated and mannered), will struggle to have.
Similar discrimination exist in Japan, where I lived. All my European complain about how they struggle getting apartments because landlord silently decline based on their foreigner name. One of the landlord she met, an old lady, even explicitly said she was happy "a German" applied and she felt she would take care of the place better.
Very few of them even want to BELIEVE the above Austrian girls story. The common reply is always questioning the story. Maybe some other reason, it's an anecdote, how can she be sure. (when the Austrian girl tell her German friends same questioning occur)
At the core of it the unfriendliness of northern Europe + Germany is a double punch: you're often silently discriminated, and when you try to voice it, you're often gaslighted.
At least in USA or other English speaking places those voices are allowed to be voiced, without condemnation (people will debate it, but we won't even get there for places like Germany or Sweden )
Some Germans may like to think of Germany as a country of immigrants, but it just isn't, regardless of how many live here.
US specifically already has extremely high crimes rates (compared to most developed countries) which might overshadow any effect immigrants might have.
I agree there's near infinite confounding factors. But I think the correlation is striking enough that it's relevant to this conversation especially considering that the post I'm replying to cites only non-Anglosphere countries.
This isn't adjusted by immigrant education/background though?
e.g. in the UK a slightly higher proportion of foreign born residents have tertiary degrees, in France it's the opposite (especially if we look at Île-de-France).
Australia especially is extremely picky (e.g. 60% (immigrants) vs 40%(native))
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/a0fc61dd-en.pdf?expi...
And I assume there might be other significant cultural/class/etc. differences. e.g. in the US 53% of all Arab-Americans are Christian. I can't quickly find any statistics but I assume in Europe the ratio is very different. Not saying that this specific example necessarily has an impact but differences in other characteristics might.
Generally English speaking countries tend to have and advantage at attracting highly educated/productive immigrants presumably both due to language and other cultural, economic and social factors. It's not at all surprising that their children do a better than average.
That's my point
We also have weaker regulations that allow you to start a business with basically $20 and a pressure washer, and you can legalize it with a foreign passport. The English speaking countries generally have lowest barriers to start a business which is a good release valve when you can produce value but racists won't hire you (customers will at low enough price).
I suspect illegals and foreigners in general don't cause so many problems here because its easier to survive helping us than hurting us.
Not going to write novel about this complex topic but in US, if you fail career/financially wise, society lets you easily die homeless on streets, nobody really bats an eye and everybody is focused on 'american dream', chasing money and career. Not so much in Europe. This stressor for newcomers aligns people towards direction that is actually beneficial to native society, unless they fail and turn to highly punished crime. Here in Europe we are often benevolent with social help (sometimes too much I'd say), and abuse is not uncommon, especially with migrants since systems were often not designed with this in mind. Most people perform very differently if they have firm pressure on them from many/all directions vs not so much.
Also, absolutely nothing you write is relevant about ie Switzerland, which works a bit more like US in terms of those pressures and it shows on the ground.
The issue is easily 10 levels deeper and wider, no point drilling into all of that. But please refrain from reductionism and clearly very US-centric and confident view and judging of society you clearly don't understand that much.
Obviously the US being a land of immigrants with most commonly spoken language in the world helps a lot too. The fact Europe isn't like the US doesn't make it xenophobic. Compared to pretty much anything except the US, it's still among the most accepting towards people of different cultures.
Some poor indian has no advantage coming to Spain compared to someone from the Magreb, in fact we could argue quite the opposite as their support networks/country of origin are pretty far away.
We Europeans love to look down upon America when it comes to stuff like functional government, bicycle paths and public services, but wrt immigration we’re so far behind the US, it’s not even funny.
> a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French")
We really need to copy this vibe wholesale from the US (and Canada). That people can move here but even their grandchildren won’t feel that they’re properly French (or in my case, Dutch) is obscene.
I like your observation that the root cause is the ethnic character of our states but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a note or two out of the American playbook. Truth is we’re not even trying.
Instead we’re hopelessly split between the left who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there’s a problem (and calls you a racist when you try), and the right who want to hold onto some ethnic nation state pipedream that we never were and never will be.
Europe is not the US, it can't be, and that doesn't mean we're at fault of everything. Many poor migrants come and do ok and have the same opportunities and challenges that others who fail.
But somehow is always the same subset we think about.
To lock people inside their little immigrant identity groups, even when done out of some loving inclusive anti-racism vibe, has the adverse effect of what’s intended. It’s totally possible to be Dutch and Turkish and we should celebrate that, not fight it.
Or even ask, how much should they integrate? I'm in the UK. Jewish communities seem to have held on to a certain cohesion, and kept their traditions alive well past when the natives gave up on their own traditions and communities
No matter how many decades one lives in the Netherlands, one would never be seen as "Dutch". Whereas a Mexican living for 10 years in the USA and throwing BBQs in his backyard would be seen as 100% American.
In the UK we have large numbers of both Pakistani and Indian immigrants. One group has integrated mostly successfully in all walks of life and the other one has not.
Hard to argue that this has not been a consequence of choice although plenty of experts, who have never lived with 100 miles of these communities, tell us otherwise.
When the UK began deindustrializing, they were extremely hard hit because the factories shut down.
Poverty and Northern England racism (BNP was normalized and doing hate crimes well into the early 2000s, schools were shite with grammar schools closing, etc) kept Mirpuris stuck in the ghetto.
And trust me - a Brown guy - when I say that tbe UK is miles more racist and passive aggressive to Desis compared to the US or Canada.
Why integrate in a country that keeps being passive aggressive and using your community as a scapegoat.
This is why my parents moved to North America instead of Europe in the 1990s - heck my dad had an offer to work for ARM plc in Cambridge back then around the initial IPO.
None of the doors I was able to open here in the US would have been opened if I were in the UK or Germany.
I'll get amazing schacenfreude when Labour finishes signing the FTA with India in a couple months and Rolls Royce and Dyson begin slowly moving operations.
The UK recently had a Prime Minister of Indian descent, that he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling of racism is quite remarkable given he subsequently was unable to demonstrate a talent for anything.
And the US had an African American President yet police brutality incidents still occur.
And that Prime Minister has anyhow left the UK and returned to California (a couple blocks from the Santa Monica Pier). Some GSB alums are setting up a VC Fund for that PM post-Downing Street as we speak.
Hell, his business career only started AFTER he immigrated to the US and then returned to the UK to work at TCM.
> he was able to breakthrough the glass ceiling P Money is the ultimate equalizer in a country as status obsessed as the UK.
Sunak attended an independent school which his parents were able to afford being specialists.
Grammar Schools were shut down in the 80s-90s and comprehensives continue to underperform independent schools in placing students in Russell Group programs.
If you're parents were working class, you statistically will remain working class.
Intergenerational Social Mobility remains lows in the UK [0][1][2][3], and add to that economic depression in the North+Midlands and the very real othering that happens in the UK and that has caused the Mirpuri community to remain economically deprived.
--------
In the US I never get asked where I'm from, or told that "my English is excellent", or after a couple pints with coworkers get told "you're one of the good ones". Yet I've faced this kinda BS ALL THE TIME whenever I'm in the UK for work. It's worse on the mainland.
Fundamentally, in the US I am not treated as a token nor do I face microagressions. In the UK or Mainland Europe I have to deal with both.
[0] - https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/from-briefin...
[1] - https://ifs.org.uk/news/social-mobility-continues-fall-and-m...
[2] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insigh...
[3] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-4446.1...
Other times may have different outcomes because countries and cultures change. Spain for example is a completely different country from what it was in the 80s, economically and culturally.
When you live in a place, and you see the same people showing up in stats, and people see the same behavior over and over and over and over, it's about time to quit calling people things and admit that something is going on and we should do things differently.
And if you don't then someone will show up promising to deal with it.
I know that million of white men died fighting against the Germans in WW2.
Why is it that 95% of what I hear from Jews is condemnation if white men for being NAZIs, when the majority of white men and the winning side fought against the Germans?
It seems like there should be a 60% gratitude to 40% condemnation split.
I my country Jews lived for 800 years until they left without saying Godbye in 1940s. But we have never held them hostage - they were free to move to Ottoman Empire or North Africa if that suited them better. Or behind Pale of Settlement.
Living in ghettoes, sitting shiva for members of community that married non-Jews or assimiliated, being under influence of fanatical rabbis didn't help with integration.
Some have a culture that indoctrinated them to exploit and explicitly not integrate with the general population. How would you integrate a culture that explicitly rejects integration without changing the culture itself?
Can we be more specific please?
I live in an European country and have not observed what you're describing here.
There are individuals and groups that have tendencies like you describe, but the generalization doesn't hold in my eyes.
I've had refugees in my family, inner circle, at workplaces and so on. The most general observation I can make is that people who tend to flee or migrate from authoritarian, politically oppressive places tend to be very appreciative of social democratic systems.
Strongly agreed on most of these points.
The U.S. on the one hand, for all the accusations of racism leveled against it (sometimes rightly) is generally very accepting towards immigrants and integrates them with surprisingly little xenophobia after a while. The U.S. has been doing this for many generations across many different ethnic groups and almost universally, after a couple or more generations, they identify more as americans than as members of their culture of origin, by far. Historically there has been tension and racism throughout this process but it tends to fade and millions of people of many ethnicities join the American mainstream remarkably well.
Also, it helps that American society and culture are extremely charismatic in the eyes of much of the world in a way that powerfully encourages the desire to integrate among immigrants, and especially their kids.
Most European societies don't have either of the above traits nearly as much as the U.S.
American Jew here, who spent years living in France and Spain. I've heard the same polite euphemisms refering to Arabs and Gypsies from the mouths of members of the Front National. You know, before 1945 it was said in Europe that Jews weren't able to integrate fully with the host society.
One might ask: Was that the Jews' fault? Or the host society's fault?
It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups.
When the US ghettoized Chinese economic migrants, American politicians claimed they could never integrate. And yet the Chinese-American population is well integrated and hugely successful since the host society allowed it. Same with Jews in America, and increasingly with Hispanics.
Why is it that economic migrants do, after a few generations, become successfully integrated in America, while they tend not to in Europe?
I don't think the evidence definitively supports the conclusion that it's down to which group. Europe has a problem with integration that has its roots in the ethnic character of its states (something America does not have), in deep-seated xenophobia that causes social exclusion of immigrant or out-groups, and in the fact that its states' reasons for existence are based on tribal boundaries and wars for territory rather than on achieving broader democratic and economic flourishing by harnessing the capability of the whole population. And thus Europe presents neither a dream of integration nor a path toward integration (as in, "to become American"; there is neither an equivalent aspiration nor option "to become French"). And then, once again, Europe blames the groups it refuses to accept.