Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Let me paint a picture.
Imagine a a person from a developing country. This person knows their home country is terrible and will talk at length on the how and why it is a complete disaster. It’s a combination of the system and the people that are the problem. The society is deeply screwed up for many reasons, but one of them is absolutely massive numbers of low quality people with questionable public hygiene and health.
This person is fed up and leaves. They travel halfway around the world a more wealthy and organized country, but one that’s either on the decline or on the brink of decline. This person shows up in the new country, takes a well paying job that could easily be filled by a local.
Now this person is likely one of the better people from their home country, but they inevitably bring a lot of their socio-cultural baggage with them. They fit right in with the local political party that is more than happy partner with immigrants in exchange for more political power. The person is hostile to the local customs and religion in their new country. In fact, the person goes out of their way to make sure everyone knows what a dim view they take of the historic religion of country that has persisted for thousands of years and dozens of generations. This person associates with other subcultures that are also hostile to the historic culture of the country.
I know I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said or thought a mission times but it’s still worth articulating. This person shows up in a new place and every action they take, intentional or otherwise, is destroying the this country’s culture. Remember, this hypothetical country the person went to is already on the brink. Heavily divided and new people like this matter on the margins. And this is not a one-off. In fact there are many other people doing the exact same thing every day.
Anyway, how should this person feel?Should they feel shame? Should others shame them? Do they have any responsibility to assimilate in their new home? Or least leave as little impact as possible.
This is a modern problem. In the US, immigrant communities historically were quite good at assimilating as Americans. Even today, the pressure to do so is lessened, but still exists. In Europe and Uk it seems there’s no such pressure. Immigration there at the scale we currently see is a purely modern phenomenon. And the immigrant communities are insular and shameless in their actions to change the their new countries. My original bias was that this is mainly a function of wealth and class and education. The people who act like this are poor and don’t know any better. I don’t think that’s right though. It seems to me that even this hypothetical immigrant, who would self identify as of the “better ones” has no shame about showing up in a new place and telling the incumbent people everything they’re doing wrong and agitating an already risky political situation.
What is to be done? Short of remigration, can it be fixed? I think it will be challenging since there’s often a political wedge in western democracies where half the country is using immigrants to expand their power base. Half measures will be stopped and fail.
Im not posting this to have a debate on immigration. We’ve done that many times. I’m more curious about what people think of the people who participating in this whole business. What motivations do they have? How should we react to them? Personally I have a pretty dim view of someone who would do something like this. And I’d want to understand how they feel about it. Is it intentional? Can they not help themselves with this behavior? What is it? What do we do?
I guess step one might be to at least point it out.
I come from an immigrant family that runs the gamut on this.
My parents don't care. Or rather: they're totally pragmatic. They came to America because it's the best place to be. When Trump does something annoying on an immigration level they take it with fatalism because what are you gonna do? They know they don't deserve to be in America in the AOC/Billie Eilish "no one is illegal on stolen land" sense, but it's good so they want to stay.
They don't hate the culture. Except maybe for its licentiousness but their response to this is to just stay the hell away from that shit, not try to change it. They don't get into the drama and they don't really care that you think the culture is being destroyed. That's your culture war, if you don't want immigrants don't take any?
My brother and sister on the other hand, are basically American leftists since they came so late that Africa is an abstraction to them. Constant talk about how racist America is. Why do they talk this way? Besides the fact that everything in pop culture was telling them this sort of thing was cool? Besides the fact that the natural retort that cuts down on this - "go back to your country" - was considered a macroaggression? Besides the fact that it's the common take from high status industries and people? Besides the fact that those people tell them the other side wants them dead or deported or oppressed?
They absorbed the same attitude as the people around them (except without any irony or balance from knowing a broad cross-section of Americans or having a deep link to the country), and the same embarrassment about inequity (we were once subject to a speech about how good street vendors in Freetown were compared to supermarkets because I guess supermarkets are Western and inauthentic?) except even worse for lacking a strong American history and actually coming from those countries. So they double down on the rhetoric they've been told is an answer.
Thing is: it doesn't have to be this way. Poor Africans are by this logic even bigger victims of the West than immigrants yet this wasn't common growing up. If anything, people were pretty embarrassingly obsequious towards the British (some of the stereotypes of wypipo had the younger generation rolling our eyes).
Right, so you understand the problem exactly. What's to discuss? The problem is other Americans.
It doesn't matter what immigrants think. Immigrants can be assimilated or made to say various prosocial things if they are forced to by the populace. Instead you've failed to form a unified front, so kids will misbehave. That's it.
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