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.
Jump in the discussion.
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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.
Xinjiang style will fix it quite fast.
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Who cares? Everyone has a right to act in their own self-interests to an extent. For the immigrant that is to come to America. For the American most of the time it’s to keep them out of America.
It’s just conflict theory. Act in your own best interests. I don’t need to apologize for blocking immigration and the immigrant doesn’t need to apologize for taking advantage of my idiot neighbors.
Do you think the Spanish cried when they thru Aztecs into silver mines? Or the Romans conquered Celtic territory? Might makes right.
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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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People generally don't walk around contemplating the societal implications of their actions, but for what it's worth I'll paraphrase what my relatives and others have had to say to me about it over the years. The mindset presented is I think to a large degree generalizable to different immigrant groups, but perhaps least so to Muslims for whom religion is a larger driver of behavior. Make of it what you will.
Q: Why did you come to America? And why [city] in particular?
A: We had a friend who said it was easy to find a job there.
Q: Did you always want to emigrate?
A: I didn't care either way. It was just for work.
Q: What did you think about Americans before you came here?
A: I thought they were all good looking like in the movies, handy like MacGyver, and smarter and harder working than us. How else could they have become so rich and built such wondrous technology?
Q: What do you think about Americans now?
A: They're fat, stupid, and lazy, and their food tastes like shit. The first time I saw a homeless person begging in the street I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought "You're not a cripple and are still young enough to work. Why the hell don't you have a job? You were born here! How could you have so thoroughly pissed away all your advantages in life to end up in this state?"
Q: If Americans are stupid and lazy, then where did all the technology come from?
A: The Americans a hundred years ago were different; they were like the ones I imagined in my head before. They came from poverty and built everything with their own hands, but their descendants are a bunch of spoiled brats who are letting it fall into ruin. This is an inevitable process with nations and families. My descendants will probably be like that too.
Q: Would you ever move back to your home country?
A: Of course not! It's hot and dingy and poor and [rant about local politics]. On second thought maybe when I'm old and retired. They treat their elders better there and don't throw them in nursing homes to rot.
Q: What do you think about the number of immigrants coming from your home country?
A: Obviously I don't want them all here; it was such a relief to get away from those people! But if my siblings or cousins want to come that's fine. Family is different.
Q: Do you want your children to be closer to American culture or their ancestral culture? What sort of future do you want for them?
A: What matters to me is that they have a good standard of living. Anyone who grows up here is going to be Americanized, but I speak my language to them because it's easier for me and because maybe it will give them international job opportunities in the future. If things remain fine in America they should stay, but if the economy is bad then they should leave and go someplace better.
Q: You're a naturalized citizen now. Does that make you an American?
A: What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I'm not an American! Don't insult me like that again.
Foreigners from poor countries are quite well aware that, even today, Americans are vastly more productive and advanced. Though, I grant, there's a contempt for your decadence - especially the homo shit.
Coping that America isn't that far ahead seems like a thing for Europeans, maybe. The Third World cope is more likely to be "the American Empire does it by robbing us"
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I'm not really sure what the point of this post is aside from getting people to gang up on and dogpile about "immigrants bad". It's a bit of a hot topic for smallscale question sunday, but a bit devoid of true value for the culture war thread. The majority of people here, myself included, have some variation of centrist (some leaning left, some leaning right), or very right wing take on immigration, and if any don't and for some reason decide to respond I fully expect a debate to break out.
I am not a mod, I am not formally accusing you of breaking the "Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity" rule. But I am going to gesture at it disapprovingly.
I tried to very carefully avoid consensus building by keeping it general. And it’s not a policy debate.
In my opinion, I find the behavior I described to be very rude (at the very least). I want to know what others think. And if they think it’s not rude, I’d certainly like to hear why not.
I don’t know how many economic migrants we have here on TheMotte, but perhaps if there is one here, they can share their experience.
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I came upon this X thread right before reading your comment: https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/2086713323022659973
The thesis is that there are two reasons why a man will hate you:
He will hate you because you harmed him.
And he will hate you because he has harmed you.
A political refugee fleeing a communist state will love their new country. They are not hurting their new countrymen, they are contributors and they love their new freedom. Their new freedom does not detract from everyone else's freedom, they are adding to their host country's freedom by demonstrating the beauty of that freedom to those who maybe have become complacent in it.
An economic refugee fleeing a shit hole will have to accept lots of financial and other help. If that financial help is coming from a wealthy benefactor who is willingly giving the support, then maybe it can be tolerated because there is a personal relationship. If that financial help is coming from a tax base that is increasingly strained, that financial aid is coming from hurting the native populace, even if that pain is intentionally spread out to be tolerated. And so the economic immigrant has to find a reason why the native population deserves this pain, reasons why this harm is just. And if there are no obvious reasons, reasons will need to be invented.
I think this might get more responses in the Culture War thread. I worry I've crossed the line already in this post though we've kept it vague so far.
Thanks. I thought all of these responses brought interesting idea to the table.
And yes, I’m hesitant to bring to the main thread as well.
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The average person with a "No human is illegal" sign on their lawn would never, ever, ever act like that. If you described this behavior as "American passport bro goes abroad and acts like an asshole", they would utterly revile him. The thought of going to a foreign country and being indignant that people there don't speak English or mispronouce your name, or misunderstand your customs would disgust and horrify them.
But they don't see immigrants to the West as people, as agents, as adults, as fully human. They see it as something like a shelter dog rescue that makes messes on the floor (even if they'd quietly have such a dog returned and euthanized).
It's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth. Even professional-grade racists like Asians and Slavs don't usually hate themselves too.
As for the immigrants who engage in the behavior you described, I think that behavior is retarded and low-functioning and utterly predictable. Memes want to propogate themselves, and that includes cultures and customs, no matter how poorly they perform at their ostensible function, and that's before we get into the human capital aspect, much less the crab-bucket envy.
Immigration, should we permit it at all, should require an abandonment of old loyalties (including citizenship) and a ban on remitances, and that should probably be Step 1 of the process.
Want to be an American? Burn the bridge behind you. Leave no retreat.
More or less true. The rest of this comment is basically slander.
There’s probably a leftist out there who would endorse the racist paternalism you describe, but that person is not an “average person.” The concept is so far outside the Overton window that it horseshoes around to the general fringe category.
Oh, come on. It wasn’t enough to make a strawman of the policy? You had to have them killing puppies, too?
I don’t believe that you want to escape that conclusion.
Perhaps this is because “racist” is the wrong label for what you’re describing.
You’re putting an awful lot of words in people’s mouths. If those words are shocking and incoherent, if you notice you are confused, maybe they aren’t the right words.
True, prosecutors and judges tend not to be average people. In that case, you have 2 possibilities: either the true belief is limited to them, or it's politically advantageous for them to act in a way indistinguishable from believing it [in which case we need to ask why that is, and we can assume that, because some of these are elected positions, that the charge of racist paternalism can be said to extend to a significant portion of the population, or at the very least it doesn't bother them].
I think most of the moral sentiment that caused racism in the first place is absolutely alive and well (in that some people have a psychological need for an enemy outgroup categorized by simple observable markers like skin color and gender, and furthermore that people who do this are inferior themselves), and I even believe Progressives when they claim it's [relatively] uniquely a problem with whites. Perhaps ironically, I think this is an HBD thing.
Naturally, I am highly suspect of a race of people who then seem to exempt themselves because they say "look we're maximally discriminatory against ourselves on the basis of race", because the intent is the crime, not the fact it was ever done (which is also the problem with other X-supremacy groups, most notably feminists/gynosupremacists). The correct lesson, and one the classical-liberals tried to teach in the '70s, is that the correct way to not be discriminatory on the basis of race is to not be discriminatory on the basis of race; their folly is that this discriminatory behavior is, in fact, innate to white people (and cannot be trained out of them), and they were just laying the grounds for the (overwhelmingly white) daughters of the Confederacy to roll right back over them with their new racism after classical-liberalism reached its high water mark that decade.
Which also explains the related phenomenon where a non-trivial number of [assuming/acting in the progressive framing] "white supremacists" are black or hispanic (or married to one). That inconsistency is resolved if you assume Progressives are more guilty of the discriminatory-intent-mind-crime (which is what non-progressives actually mean by "racism") than those who they accuse of it.
It doesn't need to be if you accept the progressive framing that "white supremacy" means "being of a mental state that opposes the progressive power structure", but at that point "white supremacy" is not the actual crime.
It occurs to me that there is a funny counter factual out there where people of different skin colors are really all nearly identical on all the measurable things that are supposed to matter (intelligence, crime, education, financial outcomes, hygiene, health, inhabiting clean a tidy communities, etc.) and then you have the racists making enemies of certain pigments. But then they would struggle to come up with any reason why they don’t like group besides the mere color of their skin. It would be rather ludicrous. I suppose there are a lot of people who do think that’s our current situation.
Is it really the skin color that people object to when they think about immigrants?
Once you control for class filter bubbles (i.e. if you believe the only people who exist are middle or upper class, and in that case/context, what you have stated is literally true) this is exactly how progressives behave (the pigments they hate are white and yellow). It's not ludicrous, it's personally advantageous- those classes are shrinking, so as any
good whorerational actor would do they sell their dignity and do stupid things like "be racist against themselves" (the upper class that pays them loves a good self-hating worker who tells their fellow workers they deserve lower wages because of their pigment). That is how they defect against everyone else, by signalling that a lower [sociofinancial] salary will be acceptable to them, and the other workers who won't do the same thing should be fired (or killed).It's the exact equivalent to a scab working behind a picket line, just using an expanded sociofinancial sense of salary, not just the financial one most are used to. Rational, yes; but the union response to that sends goons to their homes to extract a little rent of their own, and so far that clearly hasn't been happening for a bunch of reasons that are out of scope of this response.
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Openly endorse it? Never. That's a second order consequence that would make them look bad, so it's basically an antimeme.
Live every day as though that were a fair and accurate description of their true beliefs? Yes, I observe it personally all the time, it's a constain refrain in their published works ("X bad behavior is just a reflection of the oppression they suffer!" is an entire genre of progressive articles), and it's borne out in studies and research (e.g. progressives dumbing down their speech and downplaying their competence when speaking with black/brown people).
What's a better one?
The confusion was wondering why progressive people I know seem incapable of assigning blame for bad behavior to anyone but straight white men. The "words in their mouths" may be less than charitable, but they're an explanation that resolves the confusion.
Do you have a better one?
Maybe they won't endorse it because, you know, they don't believe it? Second-order consequences are for nerds.
The modal progressive believes that people deserve the same standard of living. When reality falls short, he blames the people with the most money and power. In America, that's usually white dudes, but anybody who does well enough gets trimmed out of the coalition. See Asians. The rest of the world imports their narrative from us whether or not it makes sense.
Sometimes, he gets a slice of that money and power, then drives himself nuts trying to bring the world a little closer to his ideal. Call it "neurotic philanthropy."
What does that have to do with anything? Do you use that standard to disregard all criticisms of conservatives? "Well, they say that aren't Xist, so you should stop calling them that." In either case, we can look beyond people's own self-conceptions. Though IME, if you lay out enough rope in the right circumstances it really isn't hard to trip leftists into essentially stating "Whites are the master race and that's a bad thing". They just absolutely will not close the loop, and it's fascinating to watch play out.
Right, which is why they had the national guard deport the busload of immigrants who made it to Martha's Vinyard.
But I'm not even talking about vast, general trends. I'm talking about specific individuals. I can tell my progressive friends about an absolute fucking idiot I encountered, and the part where I literally saw her committing welfare fraud, and if I phrase it to imply she's a low-class white, they laugh and sneer. If I reveal she's Hispanic, they suddenly find vast reserves of sympathy and patience.
It's the exact phenomenon Scott wrote about where all his oh-so empathetic friends were very humanistic and somber when bin Laden died and then turned around to chant "DING DONG THE BITCH IS DEAD" when Thatcher passed, but very clearly race/culture coded. The same people who would express grave concerns about the brutal consequences of America's prison system on the brown illigrant who raped and murdered a teenaged white girl would laugh about TheNybbler going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison if he failed to mention an elementary school shrink visit on a gun permit.
It certainly looks like they think he's the master race, and ought to have known better and deserves what he gets, while imprisoning the poor immigrant is like beating an animal that doesn't understand it did something wrong.
Solzhenitsyn wrote on this. Remember that kerfluffle? Remember Ma'khia Bryant?
I once had a Haitian kid who worked for me. He apparently straight up told the (female) hiring manager "I have a learning disability. I just need someone to give me a chance.", and so he was hired and assigned to me. He wasn't a bad guy, but his general level of competence and basic problem-solving was painful. And the amazing thing was watching some of my most diffcult, entitled, asshole regular customers suddenly turn into kindergarten teachers when he was helping them, just so proud of themselves for being patient and understanding with the slow guy with an accent. I have a white kid now who isn't nearly as bad, and the same customers treat him like something to scrape off their shoes if I can't interceed.
It's not reality falling short, it's people. Individual humans. It wasn't reality that repeatedly raped a 10 year old, it was Tue Lue Vang, who was pardoned by Tim Walz and Keith Ellison to protect him from consequences. Meanwhile Brock Turner is a vile piece of subhuman shit who deserves to spend his life being raped in prison.
If someone isn't willing to hold an immigrant to the same standards as a native, then they ought to have to justify that stance. And if their own ideology says that such a disparate impact is obvious evidence of giga-racism, then they should have to weasel their way out of that too.
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That wouldn't happen - people do not work this way. I mean, you can get people to say anything, especially if you pay them to say it and punish them if they don't, but words are wind, they'd say one thing and will enact another. Retaining the feelings for the "old country" is a common immigrant theme, and you will never get rid of it. You can, however, combine it with the loyalty for the new country - and in the US, this had been successfully achieved by generations of immigrants. People may be proud of their Irish ancestry (completely random here on the specific origin, would apply to the most of other origins) but you wouldn't find many to keep up with contemporary Irish politics and try to mold US society in was that would benefit Ireland - most people don't think that way and wouldn't know where to begin if they did. There's no need to burn any bridges because those bridges, for the longest time, stayed in one's imagination and one's past. You don't need to burn the past to have a future.
This however changed with the advent of wokeness and multiculturalism. This is a religion that says your past is your future, and there is no escape. Not only you are not expected to go towards your future without being bound by the past, the mere suggestion that one might do it is considered the supreme sin. Nobody can ask you to assimilate, and whoever even hints of it is the enemy. This is what broke the model. The premise that your old loyalties always define what your new loyalties must be, and it can not be and must not be otherwise. What previously had been a weird exception, became the norm. And since it is hardwired into the ideology ruling one of the major US parties, it is hard to de-normalize now - any attempt at it would automatically be considered as a partisan attack.
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I can't really make sense of it and land on whether they are incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.
Both kinda make sense. If you don't view someone as being an agentic human, you don't make any demands of them. In fact in that framework it would be wrong to do so, in the same way that you don't put children in jail for punching someone.
But on the other hand - if you really favor someone, in the way that a person without a moral conscience would stick up for a close friend even if that friend killed an innocent, then you'd let them get away with all sorts of wrongs and breathlessly make excuses for them. This interpretation matches more closely with the following: The strong need (among a majority of Westerners) to be the polar opposite of a colonialist slave-owner or a nazi. And the need to 'balance things out' in some weird Marxist way, between large groups of 'oppressors' versus the 'historically oppressed' or 'underrepresented' people, even if the current generations or specific individuals weren't guilty of the wrongdoing or weren't a victim of the wrongdoing, respectively.
As in they implicitly assume third worlders to be subhumans who aren’t responsible for their own behavior.
To be fair, it's not only third-worlders. They oppose criminal justice, on the premise that the criminals are never responsible for their own actions - it's the society that formed them and the circumstances that the external oppressive powers put them in. Since the society, in their ideology, is hopelessly broken, nobody can be held accountable for their crimes. They would apply it to the neighbor next door as readily as the third-worlder - provided that the neighbor belongs to one of the privileged categories. Of course, this instantly dissolves once the subject is of the disfavored category - then the script flips and it's the inherent evil always present in people of such category that is the reason.
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