‘Whiteness’, low youth engagement and lukewarm pro-Europeanism in some states risks eroding bloc’s founding values, expert says
Voting patterns and polling data from the past year suggest the EU is moving towards a more ethnic, closed-minded and xenophobic understanding of “Europeanness” that could ultimately challenge the European project, according to a major report.
The report, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), identifies three key “blind spots” across the bloc and argues their intersection risks eroding or radically altering EU sentiment.
The report, shared exclusively with the Guardian, argues that the obvious “whiteness” of the EU’s politics, low engagement by young people and limited pro-Europeanism in central and eastern Europe could mould a European sentiment at odds with the bloc’s original core values.
I’d say the bulk of the anti foreigner sentiment has to do with islam not with melanin.
Religion poses an existential threat to life on earth. Islam is especially toxic, but we don’t even have to single it out to deploy simple tests for citizenship. Free speech? Check. Democracy? Check. Women’s rights? Etc. Prove that you’re in favor of these things or fuck right off.
I’d say it has more to do with mismanagement of economies and how that impacted fertility, the consequences of which the population is facing right now rather than islam or melanin, pressed further by climate change, the Ukrainian invasion and covid.
It’s just easier to say it’s the migrants, rather than the mismanagement of economies to privilege the old and wealthy, all the while migrants are being exploited to support an economic status quo that is unsustainable, since young people are difficult to exploit even further, what with the supporting of an aging population and all. We structured an economy that expected an unending baby boom and since that’s impossible, now we have social instability.
Why not both?
Low birth rates —> neoliberals need workers so they increase immigration —> influx of religious zealotry fuels cultural friction.
Only that isn’t what happens. Radicalized Muslims are not moving to Europe, it is they or usually their children who join radicalized groups as a response to European bigotry.
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Because it offends your sensibilities doesn’t make it any less true. It is the same reason why disenfranchised white youths are prone to join white supremacist groups.
The latter also do not agree with the concept of “equal rights”. It isn’t ‘racist’ to recognize what drives disaffected youth towards antisocial behaviour in all its guises.
Yeah, and what could be less European than Islam? I’m going to go ask my Albanian friends and see what they think about this because I’m sure they’ll agree.
Yeah people like to ignore Albanians, and also forget that Turks could be argued to be culturally closer to Greeks than they are to Arabs. Albanians are also not really religiously Muslim, but rather culturally. Not so much because of enforced atheism under communist rule but because the whole experience left people with a sour taste for taking religious ideologies (too) seriously. There’s some fun polls for Muslim countries which I can’t find right now asking things such as “is there a god”, “does heaven exist” etc. and it figures that Albania, alongside with Iran of all places, is one of the countries where people who call themselves Muslim aren’t doctrinally Muslim because they don’t accept the full set of core tenets but some eclectic mish-mash. To have a comparison: That’s like Christians who believe in reincarnation.
The main issue I think is that there’s no established European Islam: Albanians aside, which generally aren’t even noticeable among the immigrant population in other European nations, Islam in Europe is dominated by non-European interpretations. Other states are sending Imams here which often have no idea about life in the countries they’re preaching in, and that’s before we get to Salafis, Iranian operatives, and like ilk, who are causing havoc deliberately. Suppose you’re Indonesian and live in Hamburg and want to go to the Mosque, where do you go? To Turks? Arabs? Persians? Neither speak your language, neither are culturally or theologically anywhere close to what you’re used to. A German mosque? You might not be fluent in the language (yet), it might not be anywhere close to what you’re used to, but you’re learning the language anyway and trying to integrate so yeah that’s an obvious choice. The community is headed by a learned Imam who definitely knows better Arabic than you so it can’t be all heresy. The alternative is some Salafist noticing you being lost and trying to radicalise you.
Germany had quite a long discussion about the whole topic, more than a decade at least, and by now there’s the first Imams educated in Germany. I kinda doubt such a thing is easy or even possible in, say, France, which is way too secular for politics to even touch religion with a ten-foot pole (the Muslim communities wanting to build that Imam training centre got state aid to establish it), or on the other end of the spectrum the Nordic countries, which have a single instead of a multitude of state churches.
Also the Serbs were good in committing genocide in Bosnia to wipe out the Muslims from Europe!!! We should have kept supporting them!!!, like some politicians back then, alleged and some people now try to revise the history of the genocide…
Islamophobia is genocidal like Antisemitism and other bigoted ideologies.
It is crazy how now a lot of the same sentiments are nurtured and normalized now against Muslims, that grew into the Holocaust against Jews 80 years ago.
A very naive or horribly dishonest take.
There’s plenty of racism in Europe that has nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.
If the situation is anything like on this side of the Atlantic, the distinction in popular imagination is ever-fluid.
Secularism as a European value already excludes anything Islam-related from the picture. As it should be, fuck Islam.
Yeah, fuck the religion of 2 billion people in the world… Also look at our great secularism, that is forbidding women what to wear in places like France and Germany and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians who have the wrong religion or skin colour in the past decades and millions in the past century. What a great civilatory achievement!
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You just called a quarter of the world population “dogs”. Fascism is truly alive and well in Europe.
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Removed, civility.
How convenient after 25 years of hate propaganda and radicalizing people through constant racist exclusion. People whose great grandparents and grandparents moved to countries like Germany or France in the 50s-70s are still considered “the Turks”, “the North Africans”, etc. Now add to that increased racism and systematic discrimination and accusation of being criminals, radicals, terrorists…
Also it doesn’t matter if you have Turkish, Pakistani, Indian, Arab, Persian, Viet, Thai, Chinese or any other ancestry with “melanin”. People are facing racism both directly or there is the trope of thinking them to be Muslims, based on their “melanin”.
At the core remains a white supremacist idea, that is just expressed differently but remains to target everyone outside of it.
Seems bad, however: europenus
No shit. I see and hear so much pathetic racist bullshit in Europe I want to vomit more than I could possibly eat. Pathetic little racist shitstains thinking they are somehow superior to “brown people”. /a “white” person with common sense and no inferiority complexes
Really? Literally noone I’ve talked to believe themselves to be superior, they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and “we don’t have enough for ourselves”. The first two are based on official, government provided statistics, the latter is based on feelings derived from our stagnating economy. People don’t see any benefit from the european migrant crisis, only downsides.
I personally don’t see/experience any of that either, but ask some “native brown” (adopted/2nd,3th generation fully integrated/…) whether they have the same experience and you’ll likely get a different answer.
they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and “we don’t have enough for ourselves”.
This is exactly the kind of racist bullshit I am talking about. As if any of these had anything to do with where people come from, and not everything to do with how they are taken care of (or rather not), and how corporations fuck you over.
No population in this world has more or less assholes because of their color of skin, country or origin or religion. Talking about “migrant crime” as a problem, instead of seeing it as a consequence of giving people no chance to live a decent life, and working on the actual fucking problem, that’s a deeply racist talking point.
The whole point of racism is to direct anger of the masses away from those assholes actually responsible for their misery - the megacorps, banks, rich people and establishment politicians - at a convenient out-group, so that the masses do not get any ideas that would indeed change something for the better. And people who think migrants or migration are/is the problem are lacking the education to see through this bullshit and gobble up the lies and end up serving as useful idiots to the powerful.
People who believe this bullshit and regurgitate racist talking points are one of the most powerful tools of the wealthy to prevent the sensible people from driving politics that would actually change things for the better.
Fuck racists, and eat the rich!
I’m in Portugal were the single biggest immigrant group by far are Brasilians and the biggest discrimination is against Brasilians, even though they generally look like the Portuguese and speak the same language (though have a different accent) and there are also immigrants from Africa who are much less likely to be looked down on.
The whole thing is far from just plain Racism and is more broader.
Keep in mind that there are real problems associated with immigration, mainly that at least at first they put downwards pressure on salaries because of increasing the Supply of workers (it takes a while for the increase in consumption from immigrants to feed through into a higher Demand for workers), lower levels of formal education (some societal problems that the increase in formal education in Portugal since the end of Fascism in 74 had naturally corrected - such as religiosity, conservatism and illiberalism - are being imported again with immigrants) and due to different cultural expectations and behaviours so if they’re a large enough number and come from a heavilly nationalist country, that can be a problem (for example, over 60% of Brasilians resident in Portugal voted Bolsonaro, whose politics are far more Fascist than even the most Far-Right party in Portugal).
I think we need to separate Immigrants from Immigration: it’s absolutelly possible to be against “inviting more people over” (Immigration) and still think that we should to treat those who came at our invitation (Immigrants) with the respect that guests deserve - there really is no inherent right for people outside to be invited in (though I would say those who can do have a duty of within their possibilities help those in so bad conditions they qualify as Refugees, who are but a tiny minority of Immigration).
And yeah, I absolutelly agree with you that the anti-immigrant demagogy is a play from the rich to deviate the rightous anger of the locals who feel their lives are getting worse away from those who are trully to blame for it (the rich and their very much local wilful servants in the major political parties) and towards the people who have the least power over here of all people (immigrants can’t even vote). In some countries (such as the UK and US) you see the very same kind of group demonisation and scapegoating deployed against Immigrants also deployed against the Poor (anybody who lived in the UK should be abundately familiar with the “Lazy Poor” rethoric) which IMHO reinforces the point that this kind of demonising of the weakest in society is a propaganda technique rather than a natural phenomenon.
I would even go further and say that the conflation or anti-immigration with anti-immigrant is purposeful and leverages the liberalist takes that the “modern” Leftwing in Europe has copied from the Anglo-Saxons world to get them to end up taking pro-immigration postures thinking they’re defending an oppressed group (immigrants) and that puts them against an ever increasing fraction of the population who do have fair concerns (though they too have been swindled into being anti-immigrant when the source of their problems is high rate of increase in people competing for the jobs, with lower average education levels and different cultural norms and even political preferences - i.e. the immigration)
I think the “thinking” Left needs to separate immigration (inviting people over), from immigrants (people who came because we invited them over in the past, so our guests) and refugees (people who we are helping or should help due to their dire need and we being able to help them) and treat those things differently since there is really only a moral and ethical duty for the last 2, not for the first one.
Do you have anything to verify your claim that the biggest discrimination in Portugal is against Brazilians?
I already know that your claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue…
Me living in the place and having talked to Brazilians about it and hearing what people around me say, including my aged parents as they start saying more and more racist shit.
I mean, if you can get me access to that peer-reviewed scientific study that made you conclude that my “claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue” I’ll be happy to have a look at the section in it about the single biggest minority in Portugal by quite a distance - Brazilians - as any study made in the last 20 years not covering them would be highly unrepresentative.
I have no data but anecdotally, based on the people I know who have lived there the idea that Africans are less likely to be looked down upon that Brazilians of European descent is farcical.
So it’s your certainties used to dismiss as “untrue” and now again as “farcical” what I wrote based on my experience of actually living in the place NOW, knowing the language and having talked to the actual immigrants here, come for “hearing about it from somebody who lived there”.
The very racists you claim to detest have such absolute hard certainties about entire peoples based on 2nd or 3rd hand accounts of who knows who, and lots of presumptions, as the ones you have just displayed about a whole country and the people living there without even having visited, to the point that you even claim to know better than an actual native living there who knows the language.
I have literally seen that formula you just used of “I know how a people are and behave better than an actual person from that group” used by outright racists, most commonly against people of Asian origin or ancestry.
The irony of a loud anti-racist displaying that very same kind of prejudice is truly extraordinary.
While I support a differentiated perspective like you demonstrate, I believe that maybe it can be summarized a little briefer:
- yes, there absolutely are problems related to immigration, that have nothing to do with intentional manipulation by the powerful
- no, those problems do not justify any racism
The typical racist thought process goes: Oh - an immigrant did crime X. How dare “they” while guests. Immigrants (from X / of ethnicity X) are more likely to be criminals. Let’s get rid of them.
Addressing those issues requires targeted solutions for complex problems. And some of those are very similar to the solutions required for children from families with a low social status: Sometimes, we have to sadly accept that adults beyond a certain stage of brain development are “beyond help” (sadly, that also means most racists have crossed a line that they can mentally not recover from), and focus on the children being given all chances to learn normal and unprejudiced social interactions. This being: give even the worst parents an incentive (typically that means money) to send their kids to public kindergardens / daycare from an early age. And provide enough spots for children / enough caretakers, and pay those caretakers a decent salary and ensure that they have a very good education.
Yes, that’s very much my point of view, only much more succinctly and well put than I managed :)
Immigration is a numbers problem: it’s the interplay of rate of arrival, rate of integration, how fast do the locals get used to immigrants and how wide are the educational and cultural differences between those already in a place and those arriving.
Immigration is also a racism problem because racism lowers the rate of “locals getting used to immigrants” and makes cultural differences seem worse than they actually are: for a racist there are no “low enough cultural differences” to make the targets of their racism feel like “one of us”, as can be seen in the US with racism against Afro-Americans who are fellow citizens with a shared culture.
All those things benefit from more Education, both adult education for the immigrants to help with flattening the educational differences (which is a good idea overall, not just for immigrants), education for their children to help integration and education for the children of the racists to stop the racism from crossing to the next generation.
This is, however a far more pragmatic take than the extremes of “we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like” on the side of the Liberals and of “foreigners are bandits and eat other people’s pets” on the side of the Far-Right.
the extremes of “we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like”
How about “everyone should be able to move freely in the world and live in the place they desire” but in order to sustainably achieve that goal, we need to make most of the world a place worth living in?
I am absolutely disgusted that I can move freely about but my Turkish friends have to ask for a Visa to come visit me.
I too think that the best possible situation would be a World were it would be absolutely normal for everybody to move around as they saw fit and one’s place of birth was irrelevant.
The problem is how to realistically go from were we are now to that utopia.
Simplistic approaches of the “lets just one-sidedly act as if we lived in that utopia and hope we’ll get it” aren’t going to do it and neither will prejudices about people because of the genetics they were born with or the geographical area they were born in.
I think the “thinking” Left needs to separate immigration (inviting people over), from immigrants (people who came because we invited them over in the past, so our guests) and refugees (people who we are helping or should help due to their dire need and we being able to help them) and treat those things differently since there is really only a moral and ethical duty for the last 2, not for the first one.
While I believe that this is a very good point, I also believe we have a duty to do our best to ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living. Especially in those countries whose natural resources we use to attain our lifestyle. And IMO the best counter-measures vs. mass migration are
- create infrastructure in the countries of origin and help towards stable political systems (i.e. the opposite of what the west has been doing in the middle east for decades)
- combat climate change
Both of these measures face the strongest opposition from the most racist people (climate deniers are strong among right-wing people which I correlate with less brain cells in active use), so in effect the political rightwing is very much causing the problems that they want to be racist about.
The kindness of that feeling if not tempered by hard-nosed pragmatism directly collides with the reality of what is actually achievable.
There are 8 billion people in this World, most of which have a lower or much lower “chance to live a life worth living” than the even the average Western.
If everybody outside the West that could have a better life in the West was allowed to come over what would happen is that the place would end up with lots of people with a far lower level of formal education (so less capable of doing the high value jobs that produce more wealth in the West), with different customs (causing lots of friction) and who do not know the language (again a problem for them to be productive alongside the natives), and its capacity to create wealth would most certainly collapse on a per-capita basis - essentially too many people coming over from places with very different quality of life and education system would kill the very golden eggs goose that justified them coming over in the first place.
There are limits to how much we can help without endangering the very thing that allows us to help, which means we have to look at it from a hard nosed pragmatic perspective. As I see it, it breaks down into 3 things:
- Triaging: we can’t help everybody so lets start by helping the ones with the most need (hence why I explicitly mentioned Refugees in my last post). In fact I think we should be actively going out and looking for those needing the most help and helping them, not waiting for the strongest and with the most capability to find the money to pay for it (so, not the ones with the greatest need) cross over on some boat.
- Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime: we should be investing in helping people to help themselves were they live, such as with Healthcare and Education. If the objective is indeed “do our best to ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” then realistically for them to immigrate over is often the least effective option to achieve that, mainly because of all the 2nd and 3rd order negative effects from it when done in very large numbers without time for integration.
- Crack down on all those Westerners who. for personal upside maximization, are helping make the countries were those people live much worse than they should be. I’m talking Financiers and Weapons Dealers helping Dictators and the Corrupt in many countries stay in power and enjoy the money they steal from the rest. I’m also talking more indirect guilt, such as the pollution produced in the West (including Global Warming) that affects poorer countries far more or even the one produced in poorer countries whilst trying to make things to sell to the West.
A genuine will to “ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living” means we have to find solutions that actually work in the context of objective reality, not high-moral-horse-ridding simplistic takes on things.
As I said in my other comment(s): We need to build up infrastructure and help to stabilize political systems and combat climate change in order to avoid ever increasing refugee streams that will overstrain any system. And our mortal enemy and traitors to humanity in this are the right-wing conservatives slash populists and racist dipshits, because they create and worsen every single reason for migrants to flee their home countries. People who further social inequality need to be put in jail and put on mandatory empathy training until they stop being sociopaths.
I strongly disagree with but this one point from you
(so less capable of doing the high value jobs that produce more wealth in the West),
There are no “high value jobs” in the West that are responsible for producing more wealth. As society, we are thieves and parasites stealing from poorer countries simply because we industrialized first and gained a technological, educational and military advantage.
Western society by and large is a parasitic life-form. And I am disgusted that the choice in this world is “benefit from exploitation or be exploited”.
I am ashamed of and disgusted by my fellow Europeans who believe that we somehow “did better” at anything, and that thereby our economical well-being is somehow well-deserved. It is not, it is founded on exploitation of the third world and it continues to thrive on cheap labor & resources and lack of regulations from around the globe.
Things like for example being able to operate certain kinds of computerized industrial machinery does mean that a single individual can produce more than one who is not able to do so.
I agree with your point that such advantages for the West were for the most down to luck rather than any kind of deserving it. Some countries did use their luck more wisely than others, but that’s about it.
I also agree that quite a lot of the “extra” value being “produced” in the West is nothing more than pillaging of somebody else’s resources. My point #3 on my previous comment is anchored on that view - I might have given just a handful of the most obviously bad concrete examples, but there is a lot more than that at more levels, especially around mineral resources.
I don’t at all think that Europeans (or any other Westerners) are any more (or less) deserving or capable than the rest - my statement on the capability to do higher value added jobs was purely of the “things are as things are hence certain actions will have certain consequences” kind and not at all a value judgement, and in another comment here responding to somebody else I actually suggested that we should be investing in Adult Education, including for immigrants, and should provide Education for the children of immigrants the same as for the children of the locals.
I also believe we have a duty to do our best to ensure that people all over the world have a chance to live a life worth living.
Which if you take a holistic view also includes things like not brain-draining developing economies. That’s going to become an even bigger issue in the future as source countries complete their demographic transition and themselves start to shrink.
In an ideal world, immigration for economical reasons just shouldn’t be a thing, and immigration for opportunity reasons rare, like joining a specific research institute as a scientist. Immigration should happen for curiosity, for love, such kinds of things.
create infrastructure in the countries of origin and help towards stable political systems
That is so much easier said than done. Without sane politics in place over there investing in infrastructure means the local grifters pocket everything. Stability alone is not sufficient, plenty of kleptocracies are plenty stable. Many are even democracies. It’s always easy to blame colonialism but colonialism didn’t destroy South Africa’s electricity grid: The ANC did, and the ANC alone. What do you suppose we do against that kind of thing? Send cannon boats up rivers, like in the good ole days?
combat climate change
Definitely important, but also not sufficient on its own. It’s just the crisis of the day, plenty of other sources of trouble in the world.
so in effect the political rightwing is very much causing the problems that they want to be racist about.
Let’s not wash the hands of the left clean by missing that in practice, it’s not addressing the issues either. The left is usually right in its material analysis, the right is generally (and frighteningly) right in its emotional analysis – that’s their thing, they slavishly resonate with people’s worries – neither is any good at actually fixing shit. If the left was, then the right wouldn’t have anything to resonate with, or it would occupy itself with makeup trends or whatever. I agree, painted on eyebrows are a danger to what is good and proper, to civilisation itself.
There are definitely Europeans who think they and their culture are superior.
you get those in any culture without doubt, yes. But I doubt they are as numerous as people think.
Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.
And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.
Canada was built by immigrants. But I don’t care what colour someone’s skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can’t even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?
And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.
See my other comment. Immigration is NOT your problem. You are falling for the carrot that the assholes actually causing this social inequality are dangling in front of your nose.
Eastern and Central Europe didn’t join the EU because they loved the western liberal ideals so much. It was a way for them to get out of poverty and to stop any aspirations of Russia to march into their countries. And now their economies have grown the basic needs of the people are met and now they have time to think about the other things the EU brings and turns out many don’t like many of those things.
Yeah, Europe is about pure European whiteness. Just ask half the population of Iberia. Or most of the population of Hungary. Or pretty much anywhere previously ruled by the Ottomans.
“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.
Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.
Ask any black soccer player
Not the best example if you want to argue that it’s not about skin color, tbh.
“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin.
Replace “White” with “Racism” and you’re on the money.
Whiteness has always been more important in the US that in Europe. People here have always been surrounded by other “white” nationalities and cultures that they could still be racist against.
Of all the things people say about Roma, them not being classified as white is one I have never heard.
Many Spanish people face racist attacks in more pale countries like Germany, where they are considered to be part of the brown people.
Fascists and Racists are not know for differentiation.
Wait a minute… what do you think an avarage Hungarian looks like?
Yes, the founders of the kingdom of Hungary came from the east… but we are not talking about Magyars 1500 years ago. Based on your post it seems you have some… stereotypical preconceptions about what modern day Hungarians look like.
No, I’m saying Europe hasn’t been all white people from day one. I’m not sure why that wasn’t clear to you. You do know the Moors were driven out of Iberia in the 15th century, right?
An institution like the EU is always going to be vulnerable to bigots and idiots in large numbers. The EU is also often viewed as an impediment to big business. Their values are not the same and I’m glad about that.
As a European, this article confuses me.
Hehe peanness
It’s truly a world-news sub, cuz I was like “du-uh, where’s the news?” until it hit me.
- Far right has been on a steady rise
- Refuges are gathered in concentration camps on Islands
- Most recently everyone’s fighting about who should get those refugees
- There are within-the-eu border checks specifically targeting migrants
Tell me more about “sentiment”. It’s not sentiment, it’s white/european supremacism being executed full force in plain daylight.
Yep, this is my best guess for the EU, sadly. It will keep being democratic and united, but adopt a more East Asian-style attitude to the rest of the world in the process. Oh well, hopefully we can pick up the internationalist slack in Canada.
Meanwhile, the US is probably going to explode one way or the other.
Canada has our own issues with national identity, and it’s only being exacerbated by the weak policy making that is doing very little to stem the tide of irresponsible immigration that only serves the ruling class by growing their real estate portfolio’s worth. Between corruption at the highest level in our Federal government, and the Trumpian brainrot that PP and people like Jordan Peterson and Maxime Bernier are more than willing to incept feeble-minded Canadians with, we ain’t picking up shit for slack.
I mean, if we could build some more damn houses, immigration has been unambiguously great for our economy and general demographics, and Anglo Canadian identity was never a real thing to start with.
Nationalism sucks no matter who does it. Address immigration problems using data and pragmatic policy. Don’t address it by allowing bigotry to fester in your population based on lies.
Seriously. Why does every single Center->Left of center government not understand the alt-right playbook at this point? Stop trying to fight fire with water (good guy things) and start taking a page out of the Dark Brandon playbook.
While skin hue may be a visual clue, I’m wondering if the underlying problem is global warming and global conflict driven by colonialism/capitalism.
I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.
There wouldn’t be any problems if the idiots in charge required some integration for civic purposes. Can’t speak French? Alas, you can’t be a French citizen. Duh. Religious zealotry? No thanks, we’ll pass. You don’t agree with democracy and free speech? Then go away.
More dishonesty. Plenty of racism is directed towards those with a better grasp of the native vernacular than the natives. It’s why those people are aware of the racism directed towards them in the first place.
??? You’re so far off topic I don’t even know if you’re replying to the right comment.
And you do not appear to have a grasp of reality.
What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation? If you have large migrations, they will lead to ethnic enclaves, which means the strongest point of integration will be when the children of the migrants enter the education system.
What do you do if - let’s assume- integration is proven to require a generation?
It doesn’t. Provably, so I really don’t get where you’re trying to go with this.
It’s actually often the opposite under certain conditions (which right now aren’t that uncommon): Kids of immigrants are less integrated than their parents. Which btw isn’t a Europe vs. non-Europe thing it also happens with inner-European migration. Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.
Heck the basic mechanism also applies to e.g. inner-German migration, kid of a Bavarian couple in Lower Saxony sticks out enough to be “The Bavarian” in class.
sounds like your society’s got a ton of racism that’s precluding the second generation from gaining acceptance
What’s your alternative? Enforce a common culture across the whole world so that noone ever sticks out when abroad?
Una in diversitate, not e pluribus unum.
No… the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who “stick out.”
And what makes you assume that we don’t put up with Bavarians? We’re a stem family society it would be deeply suspicious to us when people from abroad suddenly discarded all of their roots. Come here from Japan? Prove you’re an actual human being by missing Nattō and prove you’ve become German by complaining about it being so hard to get here.
yeah, that seems like a society with diversity but no inclusivity
You’re seeing the results of that experiment in real time
I am - it doesn’t seem all that apocalyptic. If you take the Syrian population, it’s a huge improvement. Besides the typical issues associated with taking a big refugee population like that, I’d say the biggest issue was that ISIS was still highly active.
If the first gen of migrants doesn’t integrate properly. Like be able to speak the languages at a decent level so they can get a job. It will have cascading negative effects to the next generations. It will affect the next generation because they are more likely to grow up in a household that is poor, where they don’t speak the language of the host country which will negatively affect their school performance and where they don’t teach their kids the culture of the host country so these kids will always feel like outsiders.
This basically happened with the wave of migrants from North Africa and Turkey that were brought over to Western Europe as labor after WWII. The first gen didn’t cause much trouble, they just did their job and went home everyday, even though they didn’t integrate well. Since everyone thought including the migrants that they would return home after a few years. But it was the generations after where we see the negative effects of this failed integration. High school dropout , illiteracy, jobless and poverty rates are much higher than other groups including other migrant groups. And as a result crime rates including organized crime are also disproportionately higher among the descendants of those migrants from North Africa and Turkey. And also there is a lower sense of belonging among these migrants.
We basically have to make sure the first gen understands what it takes for their kids to thrive in their new homeland. And that means integrating, learn the language, understand the culture. And the government must prevent enclaves.
I’m a 3rd gen Asian migrant in Europe and went to school with many 2nd gen migrants from Morocco. I’ve seen this first hand. Many of these kids were basically behind in school and mostly because they didn’t speak the language well. And even as adults they still don’t speak it properly. I only know a few of them who went to uni. And the parents of those few spoke the host language at a decent level.
Integration requires a choice, not a generation. If what you mean to say is that hyperconservative religious zealots are unable to wrap their minds around women’s rights and democracy, then that’s their problem. Plenty of people around the world would give their left nut to live in a free democracy. Remember, that’s just 8% of the countries on this planet and basically the only ones with any upward mobility for the masses. The fact that religious fucks can’t be bothered to learn a new language or use basic reasoning to come to the conclusion that democracy is good is their problem.
Hyperconservative religious zealots of the kind who refuse to learn a new language aren’t even a majority in the nations these people come from. The “religious fucks who don’t learn the language” are small population which detracts from the millions who already have. Go look up the statistics on Syrians in Germany. The only people not learning the language are those who were already old when they got there.
Language is only a tiny part of integration. Authoritarian and conservative ideology is a much bigger issue.
Daily reminder that religion is a monstrous evil.
Yeah it’s them immigrants causing problems with their “whiteness”!
Your solution to a lack of diversity and tolerance of other cultures is to further squash them?
France is already abhorrently racist as fuck, not being worse isn’t the cause here.
What does anti-democratic religious fundamentalism have to do with skin color? Have you met American Christians?
Also, the only diversity I care about is intellectual. Why would we base our immigration policy on “race” quotas, which is what you seem to be suggesting, instead of merit? Especially when the bar is so so low. Don’t be a religious shitbag. Easy.
That’s great that you don’t care about diversity, the non-white Europeans who suffer the effects of your xenophobia certainly do as is evident by the report.
Removed by mod
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR):
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - Germany
Wikipedia about this sourceThe Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this sourceGood.
