Tag: Immigration

Immigration, Assimilation, America.

We’ve done this repeatedly over our own history. This current wave of immigration is not the first time that we have had a big wave of immigration, that causes turbulence, and then we come out the other side, and we’re all better off.

– Bob Putnam

It happens that my ancestors came to this country in 1640, so we’ve been here forever.

And we were doing just fine, and then the Dutch arrived. Now, don’t get me started on the Dutch. It was really hard for us to get along with the Dutch, but then we eventually got along with the Dutch, and then we forgot they were Dutch.

And then they were just us.

And then the Germans arrived, and they were really difficult, and we had a lot of trouble assimilating the Germans. And then, after a while, we got adjusted to them. And we, sort of, didn’t even notice that the Germans were Germans.

And then we invented, at that point, a term called Anglo-Saxon to refer to the Dutch, and the Germans, and us.

And then we had a lot of trouble when the Irish arrived…

 

Anti-immigration <==> Don’t know many immigrants

The National Front has, in recent years, become more popular in many rural areas and small towns like Wizernes, places that are often relatively homogeneous and have few immigrants.

– Will France Sound the Death Knell for Social Democracy?, January 26, 2017 at 10:59AM

It’s the same here in the UK – many of the places that voted most heavily for Brexit, and are most anti-immigrant, are also the ones with very few immigrants.

I’m guessing it’s easier to whip up a fear of the unknown – immigrants people in, say villages of NE England, have never met – than of the known – immigrants people in London meet, work and play with every day.

Further down, in the same article… Lecoustre is anti-immigration, NF supporter, while Sailliot is anti-NF, leftist union leader.

I asked Lecoustre if immigration had changed his life in any direct way. He thought for a moment. “No,” he said.

Sailliot interjected. This was the absurdity of it all, he said. There were hardly any migrants in the area, and yet somehow, immigration was everybody’s biggest problem. How could that be?