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Notes -
I don't remember bringing up any of those arguments actually. Did you just tag me because I'm one of the only pro-immigration people around here?
I'll be clear about what I believe:
Any sort of tension will grow. I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.
First of all it erodes trust. No matter what the difference in question is, people will notice and keep score. They’ll notice when one of them does something to one of us. They’ll notice when governments start pandering to them at the expense of us. They’ll notice whether or not they are good citizens or not. And as this continues, trust in each other (is it safe to leave this thing in the open, or to leave access to valuable goods, or to allow access to something). It erodes trust in institutions that will be shown to favor one group over another, to unfairly enforce laws, or to attempt to shift culture in favor of them you no longer expect those institutions to be fair, neutral, or beneficial to your own people.
Second, it’s inevitable that one group member will actually act out on the simmering tension. He might be drunk, high, or unstable, but he will act out that tension. It might even be an event, a perceived government misstep that feeds the narrative that they don’t respect us. And with every such incident you ratchet up the tension as the competing narratives both get reinforced. The more Allah Akhbar events happen in Christmas markets, the more the narrative that Muslims are not like the rest of us is reinforced. But at the same time the backlash makes Muslims feel threatened. BLM was the same for American blacks and whites. Whites saw that blacks hated them, blacks saw that whites don’t care about them. Ratchet.
Third, if the differences in culture are big enough, there’s an erosion of common culture. Muslims and Christians don’t have the same ideas about a lot of things — what God is like, how you express faith, what the role of religion in the state is, what kinds of activities are allowed. And in many cases, you can’t compromise. There’s no compromise between “separation of church and state” and “Shariah or else.” So you can’t heal those divisions.
The tension will only persist over long periods of time if the populations do not intermarry and remain distinct for generations due to self-segregation along religious or cultural lines e.g. Black and White Americans, Malays and Chinese in Malaysia, or the different castes in India. Note that even in those cases the situation has not spiraled out of control into a race war despite centuries of unfriendly interactions and close proximity. In other cases the groups will merge and any distinctions will fade away. In the US rates of intermarriage between Whites and every modern immigrant group will ensure this; it may be different with Muslim populations in Europe.
The question then becomes what is that new mixed population like and do we consider its creation a desirable outcome. In some cases we might consider the results neutral or positive e.g. your descendants become 5% Japanese, and in others we might consider them negative e.g. your descendants become 50% Haitian. Of course, some may reject all of these outcomes because they value racial purity in and of itself, at which point we reach an impasse.
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