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Does Mass Migration Always and Everywhere Lead to Populist Backlash?
No. It does not. I grew up in Texas during the era when the great replacement was just a factual thing that was happening, in circles which were not generally politically correct. Everyone knew we were going to have a Mexican plurality and be bilingual and the like soon. People grumbled a bit, but Trump still underperformed in 2016.
I remember my father ranting about how the Mexicans were more like the orientals(specific to vietnam war refugees) and chinamen(could also be koreans) of his childhood than like the blacks, who he thought shouldn't have full liberty of movement for crime control reasons. I recall blue collar workers talking about the need to learn Spanish to get on in their workplaces. I remember in school having to translate Spanish advertisements because that'll be the world we live in. And everyone was, if not happy about this, at least OK with it.
Of course there was grumbling about Hispanic customs like "having five names", but also praise of them for "being willing to work- you(young hydro) should take after that part". I remember people who now had to learn to speak Spanish, but also talking about how they go to church(which we should do more of, you are to understand from that part) and work hard and respect their bosses and the police. I recall lots of favorable comparison to local blacks, and griping that we(whites) brought it on ourselves by being too good to kill chickens for a living. And I remember even fairly low on the totem poll, people would say things like 'most of them are good people, I don't know about kicking them out'.
The current round of Texas border security is mostly after Haitians started arriving at the border en masse- and the core red tribe can check a map and note that walking to the border from Haiti has significant levels of geographic impossibility, so this is obviously a plot by the UN/Biden admin to hurt Texas by making us care for millions of non-contributing and criminally inclined blacks and centracos from who knows where. 'Somebody's paying for these people to come here and we can't even figure out what language they speak'. In my childhood, when it was all Mexicans? Nobody cared. The decent thing to do, up until after covid, when you found out someone was here illegally, was to not have heard it. Pre-fentanyl, pre-news headlines about people from 'not Mexico but countries south of there' busting through the border in organized groups.
Some people assimilate better than others. Canada turned racist because their newcomers were subcontinental; Britain turned racist because their newcomers, uh, set up rape gangs that the authorities allowed to operate with impunity on explicitly racial lines. In Texas? The Mexican restaurants where you can't order in English serve brisket and barbecue places offer Mexican street corn(which is, in fairness, delicious). White teenagers flirt in Spanish and switch to English when they hit the extent of their knowledge. Mexicans vote republican now. If Canada had opened their borders to Mexico and Vietnam instead of India, Trudeau would still have a job.
I don't know what my point is, it's an inebriated rant against a budding consensus on the Motte. I guess it's that there is no instinctive racism bone in Anglosphere countries that kicks in when things get extreme enough?
I also live in Texas and I absolutely do very moderately resent the prevalence of Spanish around me. I don't want to dox myself, but I'll say that over 25% of the members of my own team at my corporate desk job speak Spanish, and often will use it amongst themselves. Yes, I am aware of Texan history, and these coworkers aren't Tejano.
My family's lived in this country for many generations, and we all speak English! I stayed put in the country I was born in, so I expect to be able to communicate with the people in it. I don't fucking know Spanish!
As long as people are willing to use English with me, all is well. Conversely, if in some counterfactual world I had learned Spanish and I read this comment, I'd likely roll my eyes and think, "Skill issue."
I'd just like to point out that you can still learn Spanish! It's pretty close to English. You might even like the exercise if you've never tried to learn a language before. You might even find that a low skill level can go a long way. I understand that it sucks that it has been incentivized to the extent it has in your case, but you do live in Texas, after all.
I know some Spanish (and am continuing to work on it), and it is fun. But I also completely agree with @stolen_brawnze here: immigrants need to be expected to learn English and try to integrate. The fact that they aren't expected to do that in America right now is incredibly frustrating. I don't think that "just learn Spanish" is really an adequate answer to this problem.
I don't disagree with you, but some reckoning with reality is in order if you live in Texas and a significant amount of Spanish is being spoken around you. Spanish has pretty much always been useful there, hasn't it? At least as far back as "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", anyway. It's a question of is's and oughts. Yes, they should learn English, but they probably won't. Or they do know English and are speaking in Spanish alongside it for other purposes besides being forced to do so. It's a free country.
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