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The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there. France is a nation and a people, not an economic zone. There are countries that are nothing but administration of an area of land and these countries tend to be unsuccessful. Countries created after colonialism as nothing more than lines drawn on a map by foreigners concerned by 19th century geopolitics are terrible. Not to mention that we are giving up our history, culture and our way of being to save a government program.
Furthermore, every country is now in serious resource overshoot. Our consumption is wildly unsustainable. The population of humans is several times higher than what it was when we lived sustainably and each human consumes far more. Population reduction has benefits, cheap housing and nature. If you ride through rural Europe on a train you will barely see any real nature. You will mainly see urban sprawl and agriculture upheld by mountains of petrochemicals. Exponential growth in the number of humans isn't sustainable at all. We have witnessed a collapse in insect and bird populations over the past decades. Forests in Europe are largely gone and high intensity agriculture wrecks the land it uses.
You may have a point for France, but for America at least this is hilariously backward. It denies the whole founding purpose of the USA.
May I remind you:
Nations can be built and can thrive based on more than just ethnicity or “family” as you call it. It’s been done before, to more success than anything else in the history of the world, and we can do it again.
That poem was written by a jewish immigrant 130 years after the country was founded and about 300 years after it was settled. The US wasn't founded as a multicultural experiment but rather as a WASP country minus the british monarchy. The US is great where it isn't diverse. It isn't South side Chicago that makes the US great.
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That plaque was written by a Jew to promote 'multiculturalism' - you're not proving the point you think by raising it
Why, not. In my view Jews are some of the best immigrants to join America, they’ve made the country incredibly great, and arguably won the second world war and established American hegemony. I can’t think of a better example of the strengths of multiculturalism.
Millions of dead Russians conscripts demand a recount!
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This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move
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Maybe you can, but you won't.
The American nation, as far as I can tell, was founded through the melting pot, a ridiculously patriotic education system and culture, no social safety nets, and an unsettled frontier. You have literally none of those things now, and neither does anyone else trying to sell immigration as the solution.
Such strong faith that it’s impossible to assimilate, yet again the greatest nation on earth achieved that status through immigration.
Obviously, it’s challenging. I am the same recipe that worked in the past won’t work today. But as many have pointed out, there have been multiple waves of American immigration, it’s not like there was one unique situation that led America assimilate a bunch of immigrants that will never exist again.
You misunderstood, I'm not saying it's impossible to assimilate, I'm saying you will not take any of the steps necessary to do so.
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My Dominican wife is family. My half-Dominican children are family. My Fijian-Indian sister-in law is family.
That's nice, but it doesn't actually address his argument. Yes, there are things otherwise unrelated people can do to join a family (like getting married, as you helpfully point out), and there are things otherwise unrelated people can do to join a nation, but this isn't anywhere close to what's being proposed with regards to immigration.
What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation? Why can't they do that?
I don't feel like the people around me whose families come from Vietnam are any less Australian than someone like me whose family comes from Britain.
Sorry to double-post, but I wanted to separate my thoughts and make debating easier.
But would Australians a hundred years ago feel the same? There seems to be a runaway effect where mass migration dilutes the culture of the host country. This makes people less protective of their increasingly-globalised culture at the same time that it reduces the demands on immigrants, which leads to more mass migration, and so on.
As has been remarked about America here a few times, ‘integration’ is as much about the host culture becoming indistinguishable from immigrants’ culture as it is about the reverse. Good news if you like immigration, bad news if you like the old culture.
A hundred years ago we had the White Australia Policy. So no, people back then would probably not have felt the same.
Beyond the racism, other things have changed too. Back then we saw ourselves as an extension of Britain and a part of the empire, more than as an independent nation. We have developed our own national identity in the intervening time.
What would you say is the national identity of Australia in modern times?
In addition to what I said in another reply, you can add:
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To me, they need to commit to propagating the culture of their new home rather than their old one. That means not hanging out with other Philippinos, it means speaking almost exclusively the language of the country they immigrate to, and raising their children with the same mores and customs as the natives.
In my experience, this is very rare. Learning new languages is very hard even when you have the time and money; it’s difficult to get by at first without help from ethnic support groups; and without introductions it’s hard to get into new social circles as a foreigner. The children also tend to feel isolated and retreat into their ‘parent’ culture (where they don’t fit either).
I say the above as someone who tried very hard and failed. I’ve only seen it happen successfully once. For this reason I’m very skeptical about the viability of integration except for minute levels of immigration.
N.B. It’s also much harder if you and your children are visibly different from the people around you.
It depends on the language, but... not really? Especially if you're surrounded by the new language. Unless you don't accept anything below the native level.
The one I learned is infamously difficult, which might be clouding my view. The problem to my mind is more that even if you learn quite quickly, a lot of stuff is front-loaded. Banks, rent, making new friends… if it takes you six months to get properly conversational, chances are that you’re already hanging out with a bunch of foreigners who helped you out and it’s easier to deepen your relationship with them than cut ties and start fresh.
Again, I didn’t go Europe to Europe so it’s possibly different. But even my pretty-fluent European friends say that speaking English is more of a strain than speaking their own languages, and they get most of their news & entertainment from home.
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Loyalty, understanding and acceptance of the nation's language, culture, and traditions, some knowledge of history wouldn't hurt either.
Where did I said that they can't?
I'm a European immigrant to another European country. I've been here for about 10 years now, and in my opinion it would be ridiculous to pretend I joined the host nation. You might say that if I have kids, they'll be more a part of this place, but:
I'm skeptical. Other immigrants tell me that their kids don't belong either here, or back in their parents' country of origin.
I'd probably be more or less actively working against it. The values of the country I'm living in are weird and foreign to me, and I wouldn't want my children to adopt them.
Maybe Australia and Vietnam have so much in common that these issues don't come up, or maybe you filter out the non-Australian-like Vietnamese, but to be honest you're making it sound like there isn't really that much to being Australian other than holding a passport.
There's a lot to being Australian other than holding a passport. As is always the case with culture, not everyone embodies every aspect of it and there's plenty of similarities that can be found in other countries and cultures, but these are a sample of things that I think of as being distinctive elements of aussie culture:
Thing is, it's not actually hard to pick up these sorts of things. People do it easily and naturally. You sense the mood and attitude of the people around you and match it.
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