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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.
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.
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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