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> It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoi

by bko 2y ago

> It's a relevant question. You are blaming it on the particular group of migrants involved in the case of Europe right now. But historically Europe has ghettoized other groups. My understanding is that pre-WW2 Europe you had community groups that dealt with their people. So in a Jewish neighborhood, you had powerful Rabbis or other religious leaders that dole out law. These unofficial community leaders were given a lot of autonomy as to how to deal with their subjects. You see hints of that today in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you have un-offical private police [0]. I don't think its as simple as saying they were excluded or ghettoized. But that begs the question, what does it mean to be a country? Some people think its just magical land, like you step onto the country, get a piece of paper that says you're from that country and that's it. I think every country has a cultural identity. Much less so for America, since its the only country I know of where you can call yourself American despite not being born there or have any blood relatives from there but no one would bat an eye. But even there, some things are anti-American. Things like women being second class citizens (e.g. women can't drive or are forced to cover up). Or lawlessness (e.g. riding illegal scooters the wrong way down the street). I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If you want to treat women like second class citizens or don't have respect for private policy or rule of law, you shouldn't be allowed to come to law abiding Western country. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/nyregion/brooklyns-private-jewish-patrols-wield-power-some-call-them-bullies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/nyregion/brooklyns-privat...

noduerme 2y ago
I agree with your negative version of the point: >> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough. And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.
- hansworst 2y ago
  I think it’s true that people in Europe feel that welfare is part of the problem here. In the Netherlands for example, one of the main right wing talking point is that refugees are given free social housing which could have gone to locals that are often on waiting lists for years. In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    Er... speaking as a liberal American, this is a wild oversimplification. Housing is not a zero-sum resource. For one thing, to be a bit cheeky, when the white settlers stole the land from the Indians there was absolutely no housing at all. When my grandparents arrived in the US in the 1920s they lived in a tenement with one bathroom per floor. My grandfather saved his money as a tailor and a bartender and eventually built modern apartment buildings. If you harness the ingenuity and resourcefulness of immigrants they will build! This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.
    - dachworker 2y ago
      I agreed with most of what you posted, but you have a misconception about these "welfare states". The immigrants end up on welfare because they are not allowed to participate in the economy. Why? Partly because of bureaucracy, and partly, one might say also because of other reasons: protectionism, discrimination, ...etc.
      - noduerme 2y ago
        I think we're saying very much the same thing. Welfare to immigrants in Europe has become a tool to compensate for other elements which make finding work or gaining advancement difficult; so it is a subsidy meant to protect "native" jobs by isolating the foreign labor force. It serves a double purpose to prevent the integration of new arrivals. Worst of all, it attracts people who think they don't need to work. All of these things can be true at the same time.
aaplok 2y ago
> I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world. The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey. Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled. Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.
- noduerme 2y ago
  I agree that regimes or groups that determine citizenship along the lines of vague "values" are always fascist or authoritarian, but that's why I delineated the "values" I was talking about and restricted them to the same ones embodied by the French Republic. In responding to the case I was trying to differentiate between those vagueries of ethnic background or shared religious "morals", and the few common things enshrined in our Constitution which most Americans would agree on and which virtually all asylum-seekers are seeking as the prerequisites to individual liberty and prosperity for their families. So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.
cen4 2y ago
Just worth pointing out, exactly 100 years ago, they didn't think Jews could integrate into the America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doetoe 2y ago
It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values

by bko 2y ago

noduerme 2y ago

I agree with your negative version of the point: >> if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there But in the positive version, I think in America it is much easier to integrate if you do accept American values than it is in some European countries. And this is because, as you alluded, the only thing that makes America a unified country is a social agreement to certain shared values like rule of law, property rights, freedom to conduct business, freedom of religion, and more recently civil rights. Whereas those ideals are only recently tacked on to (most) European nations, and are not core to their identity; one can accept all those values and still never become German, for instance. Even France where many of those values originated has an ethnic nationalist core which denies integration to those who are not ethnically French. So what I mean is, accepting values in Europe is a start, but it is not enough. And what we see in ghettoized cultures around the world, from African Americans to Algerians in France, is that the ghetto creates its own logic of rejecting the norms of the society which has rejected it. Welfare is not a substitute for a path toward individual success and acceptance in society; this is perhaps Europe's greatest mistake. On welfare, in the suburbs, who will believe and not mock the supposed values of equality and fraternity? It becomes a generational problem.

hansworst 2y ago
I think it’s true that people in Europe feel that welfare is part of the problem here. In the Netherlands for example, one of the main right wing talking point is that refugees are given free social housing which could have gone to locals that are often on waiting lists for years. In America on the other hand, land was forcibly taken from the natives by colonists centuries ago. Now, if you’re looking to move to the US, you can expect to work in poverty for a few generations as a second class citizen because that’s just how the “completely fair” capitalist system is set up. Forgetting for a moment that most capital is held by a single ethnicity, and they’re definitely not going to give it away for free.
- noduerme 2y ago
  Er... speaking as a liberal American, this is a wild oversimplification. Housing is not a zero-sum resource. For one thing, to be a bit cheeky, when the white settlers stole the land from the Indians there was absolutely no housing at all. When my grandparents arrived in the US in the 1920s they lived in a tenement with one bathroom per floor. My grandfather saved his money as a tailor and a bartender and eventually built modern apartment buildings. If you harness the ingenuity and resourcefulness of immigrants they will build! This is why I think welfare states in Europe are on the wrong path toward trying to integrate foreign populations, not because it takes resources away from native Europeans (the demand side) but because it chokes off the supply side of what immigrants should expect to need to add and contribute to the society.
  - dachworker 2y ago
    I agreed with most of what you posted, but you have a misconception about these "welfare states". The immigrants end up on welfare because they are not allowed to participate in the economy. Why? Partly because of bureaucracy, and partly, one might say also because of other reasons: protectionism, discrimination, ...etc.
    - noduerme 2y ago
      I think we're saying very much the same thing. Welfare to immigrants in Europe has become a tool to compensate for other elements which make finding work or gaining advancement difficult; so it is a subsidy meant to protect "native" jobs by isolating the foreign labor force. It serves a double purpose to prevent the integration of new arrivals. Worst of all, it attracts people who think they don't need to work. All of these things can be true at the same time.

aaplok 2y ago

> I think its perfectly reasonable to say that if you don't accept a countries values, you should not be allowed to move there. If we are still talking about France, then this is a country that 10 years ago saw big groups loudly oppose same-sex marriage, and who now oppose assisted reproduction. The (black female) minister carrying the law was subject to vile racist and sexist caricatures and mockery. France is a country whose president characterised the denunciations of sexual abuse by a famous actor as a man hunt. More recently still, an "expert" was heard on a widely watched TV network blaming the victims of rape for the reduction of births in the west. The same TV network that had to apologise a few months ago for claiming that abortion is the leading cause of deaths in the world. The common point between all of these? They were all people of long term French descent. Not recent immigrants. There is no accepted "country's values" to begin with. There are laws, which are enforced and which immigrants and natives alike are expected to obey. Now since you are talking about America, there are plenty of Americans, descendants of Americans for generations, who oppose abortion, to the point where it's all but illegal in several states. The past and likely future president is a rapist who bragged about it. There are no universally shared values among the American people around the rights of women either, and that's true even if we don't count immigrants as "true" Americans, whatever that may mean. America is a country which until very recently had segregation laws, and the "values" these laws represented didn't suddenly disappear when these laws were repelled. Before claiming that immigrants should be accepting a country's values there should be some clarity around what those values are. Then someone should decide what to do with the people in the country who don't share those values. Political regimes that implement such "values"-based systems have a name: fascism.

noduerme 2y ago
I agree that regimes or groups that determine citizenship along the lines of vague "values" are always fascist or authoritarian, but that's why I delineated the "values" I was talking about and restricted them to the same ones embodied by the French Republic. In responding to the case I was trying to differentiate between those vagueries of ethnic background or shared religious "morals", and the few common things enshrined in our Constitution which most Americans would agree on and which virtually all asylum-seekers are seeking as the prerequisites to individual liberty and prosperity for their families. So I suspect but won't condemn the parent poster of conflating "values" with a blood/soil/religious code, but that is not what I meant talking about American values, which are applicable to all comers without surrendering one's belief system. In theory, French values should be the same. Jefferson thought so. And in practice, as you point out, there is a deep well of nativists in both countries who believe they possess some further mystic undefined value system which excludes this or that foreign practice. But as you say the law is enforced and the state is preeminent; the difference being that this simple equality under law is what people come to America to seek, with some conviction that they can become American while fusing those liberties to the elements of their culture that they wish to maintain.

cen4 2y ago

Just worth pointing out, exactly 100 years ago, they didn't think Jews could integrate into the America - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

doetoe 2y ago

It is ironic that you would speak of a country's values, especially in the context of the USA, where many people that consider each other Americans don't even accept each other's values