9 ms·

I don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration. What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers w

I don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration. What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers want to take part. Also, I like the idea of immigrants bringing their culture with them (and in some cases, that may be the last representation of that culture) and welcoming people to learn about it. Multi-culturalism should be about championing different cultures and not forcing everyone into a cultural homogeneity.

port11 4mo ago
GP literally addresses your points. I think we’re very welcoming in most of Europe, adopt others’ traditions, and are not too imposing. Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances. Dismissing any amount of integration is chicanery. We’re pro-social creatures, and knowing the lay of the land makes your life better.
- em-bee 4mo ago
  compared to the rest of the world europe is absolutely not welcoming. heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there. the only places in germany where i ever felt welcome was linux user groups, and other fringe groups which as a whole had more of an outsider status.
  - dag100 4mo ago
    > heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there. This is standard for most of the world. Really, only some countries, all of them developed, are exceptions to this.
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      not my experience. sure, wherever i go i will always be an outsider. the difference is whether i am welcome or not. even as a german i have not felt welcome anywhere in germany (i grew up im austria). i have been around the world and lived in a number of countries. i felt more welcome in china and even in the US for example than anywhere in europe
      - peterfirefly 4mo ago
        That might be down to your personality... or the language barrier in the case of China (or you were in China before Xi or very early in his reign).
        em-bee 4mo ago
        unlikely. friendliness is experienced from the first moment you meet someone. my personality can hardly influence that. asians and americans are simply more polite and friendly in their approach to people they have never met. of course if you are unfriendly then that may change their approach. but if that was the measure then people should be friendly to me in europe too. but they aren't. and i don't know what XI has to do with that. politics doesn't affect how people interact. not that quickly anyways. i was around when the big exodus happened in the mid-10s, and after covid china opened up instead of closing down. i don't even need a visa anymore if i just want to visit china. so even by that measure china has become friendlier. but that's not the kind of friendliness i mean.
      - dag100 4mo ago
        > i felt more welcome in china Are you white? Try being non-white. Chinese people, and most Asians - yes, the entire continent, or at least most of it - are deferent to white people. > and even in the US for example than anywhere in europe The US is one of, if not the most, welcoming countries in the world. Additionally, I suppose you probably lived in a city or at least a large town in the US rather than anywhere rural or more closed-off.
- AlecSchueler 4mo ago
  > Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances. Where I'm from (Northern Ireland) harassing women and attacking emergency services have been part of the culture for as long as I remember. Would you suggest that people arriving should actively take part in these behaviours?
  - belorn 4mo ago
    I remember a discussion I had with a English teacher from UK who immigrated to Sweden during the 1990s. They said that in UK, when a government employee would visit a house regarding dept or some other problem, they would bring a large police escort and then they and the neighbourhood would had a big brawl that generally ended with the police winning and then most of the participants would go to the pub. It was just how things worked. The guy were majorly surprised that in Sweden, the government employee could just knock on the door and talk to the person with no police and no brawl. I would assume that if attacking emergency services is the norm in Northern Ireland, so is police escorts of emergency services. That is not the norm in Sweden, through it has become the norm for certain regions where emergency services no longer feel safe going on an emergency call. The downside is that if the police is delayed, so is the emergency service, and naturally the quality of emergency service is reduce in those locations which some people say is a form of discrimination.
  - ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
    Northern Ireland is definitely atypical. An English friend of mine moved over there a few years ago as his wife is from there and her family all live in the same area. I can't imagine him being considered as "integrated" for at least a few decades. (My experience with Irish/Northern Irish people is that they're very friendly and welcoming, but I've only been there a couple of times).
  - port11 4mo ago
    That’s… a tough one. Bit of a loaded question. I would say “don’t engage in anti-social behaviour regardless of the cultural milieu”, I’m sure NI has much better traditions to partake in?
- ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
  I'm not saying that people shouldn't want to integrate, I'm saying that "demanding" it is problematic. Imagine grandparents being brought over from a different country and they don't speak the language - should they be forced to attend language school? What level of language ability would be considered the minimum and does that also include reading/writing? By all means provide encouragement and resources so that people can adapt to their new situation, but don't demand it.
  - port11 4mo ago
    Yeah, I know. That’s why I say that no one is ever happy with where you set the limit. I think demanding A2 in language is reasonable, for example. Yes, demanding, even if it’s in a reasonably long timespan. We demand much more out of everyone born in the country, don’t we?
    - dnlzro 4mo ago
      I think most liberals have the intuition that laws should apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, and I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from when we talk about immigration. A citizen who doesn't meet those demands imposed on non-citizens (e.g., language, cultural assimilation, etc.) will never be at risk of deportation, simply because they were lucky enough to be born in the country. However, it does seem that this Swedish party is willing to "repatriate" even Swedish-born citizens, so at least they're consistent.
      - pixel_popping 4mo ago
        It doesn't say that at all, Swedish-born citizens means at least one of the parent IS already Swedish, they aren't citizen at birth if none of the parents are swedish and that's just normal almost everywhere in the world. You wouldn't expect your child to be Pakistani if you get birth over there as 2 German individuals.
        int_19h 4mo ago
        Jus soli is pretty much the norm in the Americas, so it's more of an Old World / New World thing.
hackinthebochs 4mo ago
Why is the burden always on the host nation and never the immigrants?
- defrost 4mo ago
  Always? Never? There are > 190 countries in the world and many of them require immigrants to meet at least the same criteria for employment and assistance as born citizens.
  - hackinthebochs 4mo ago
    Why do people pretend they don't understand context? What do you get out of posting this irrelevant pedantic response?
- em-bee 4mo ago
  the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker. the majority needs to welcome and support the minority. and it's not that there is no burden on the immigrants. they still have to learn to understand the local language, culture, rule of law, etc... we should learn from each other and take the good from each. the burden for that is on both sides.
  - hackinthebochs 4mo ago
    I appreciate the candid response. It shouldn't be so hard for people to just clearly state the premises that motivate their beliefs. >the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker. Is this a universal principle? Does this come with any limits at all? A salient example that comes up often: classrooms tend to have a small handful of extremely disruptive students that ruin the experience for everyone else. The current thinking is to not suspend/expel these kids because they are disadvantaged or whatever. But in doing so the other kids suffer greatly, not to mention the teachers. How do you manage different dimensions of strength/advantage? It is the weakest in society (women, children) that bear a disproportionate burden of allowing large amounts of immigration from third-world countries. Why are the rights of women and children secondary to the rights of immigrants?
hagbard_c 4mo ago
> I don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration Yes, it is reasonable to demand people who come into a country adapt to rules - written and to a certain extent also the unwritten, of which Sweden has many - of that country. When in Rome, act as the Romans. This adaptation will never be 100% but that is not the point, what is most important is that newcomers learn to assimilate to such a level that the natives are open and willing to maybe integrate some parts of the newcomer's culture. People who 'are the last representatives of [their] culture' can write a book about it while becoming part of their new culture since it is clear that their old one did not stand the test of time. They're much better off that way instead of living like cultural fossils for the likes of NPR and PBS to make documentaries about. By all means document what that extinct culture had to offer but life is for the living and culture is the commonly agreed upon set of rules how to live it. Multiculturalism is a pipe dream, something dreamt up by people who listened to one too many version of John Lennon's Imagine. It has been shown not to work time and time again, it makes it harder for people coming in to a new country to assimilate and integrate because there is no clear target to aim for. Culture is not a fixed thing, it evolves through time by adopting new things and getting rid of old customs. Multiculturalism does not call for cultural evolution, it calls for revolution: here's a whole new culture, now deal with it. Revolution hardly every works and when it does it tends to go badly for those on the wrong side of it.
throwa356262 4mo ago
I think it is very reasonable to demand _some_ integration: get a job, pay taxes, learn the language as best as you can, don't do crime. But at the same time, you should not be expected to give up your culture (as long as it is not doing something against the law).
sensanaty 4mo ago
> What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers want to take part I'm an immigrant to the EU/NL (naturalized, now a citizen), and I also lived in Sweden for a short stint. If Swedes are anything, they're open and welcoming, I'd even say too open and welcoming, which is part of why these issues keep cropping up. Some context so I'm not immediately written off as ignorant or as carrying some kind of agenda: I grew up in Indonesia. My family is largely atheist, but we lived in Aceh (look up Qanun Aceh, it's Sharia law territory) and various other places around the country. I've been immersed in Islam, every sect of Christianity, Buddhism (I went to a Buddhist school as a kid), and Balinese Hinduism. I went to an international school with people from literally everywhere, and I'm still close with many of them, scattered across the globe as they now are. I say this to establish that I've actually lived among a wide range of people, cultures, and religions, this isn't an abstract opinion. This isn't unique to EU immigrant communities either, I've seen the exact same pattern in Indonesia. Many (I want to stress: many, not most, but certainly too many) immigrant groups are remarkably insular and resist integrating in any meaningful way, even multiple generations in. They don't learn the language, don't adopt the host country's customs, and make essentially zero effort to become part of the society they live in. This gets worse where there's already a large existing community of the same background, those often calcify into enclaves where you're functionally not living in the host country at all anymore. At a certain point, we also have to admit that some immigrants are the source of the problem. Where I land is this: host countries should expect integration from long-term and permanent residents, and should actively support it via language access, civic education, real investment in helping people become part of the society they're settling into, rather than leaving newcomers to sort it out alone or quietly tolerating permanent parallel communities. What that integration looks like has to be specific to the country in question, because "host culture" isn't one universal template, integrating into Aceh's legal and religious framework is a very different thing from integrating into Sweden's secular, liberal one, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But in both cases, multiculturalism shouldn't mean a one-way street where only the migrant's culture is expected to remain untouched and is treated as a holy thing while the host culture is expected to bend indefinitely until it, too, warps into something it never was. If you've chosen to build a life somewhere, the society you've moved to should welcome you in, but you should also be expected to actually become part of it. We shouldn't have to walk around on eggshells when we say that people should integrate, this should be the expectation for anyone looking to form a permanent life in a country they live in. Refugees are a different case, since they didn't choose displacement, but even there once return is no longer realistic and a person has built a long-term life in the host country, the same logic on integration eventually applies to them as well even if the urgency and framing should differ from voluntary migration. On a side note (and this is more of my own personal problem), I'd rather not see any kind of Sharia-like culture anywhere near me ever again, that crap is stone-age level bullshit that deserves to go extinct forever.

port11 4mo ago

GP literally addresses your points. I think we’re very welcoming in most of Europe, adopt others’ traditions, and are not too imposing. Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances. Dismissing any amount of integration is chicanery. We’re pro-social creatures, and knowing the lay of the land makes your life better.

em-bee 4mo ago
compared to the rest of the world europe is absolutely not welcoming. heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there. the only places in germany where i ever felt welcome was linux user groups, and other fringe groups which as a whole had more of an outsider status.
- dag100 4mo ago
  > heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there. This is standard for most of the world. Really, only some countries, all of them developed, are exceptions to this.
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    not my experience. sure, wherever i go i will always be an outsider. the difference is whether i am welcome or not. even as a german i have not felt welcome anywhere in germany (i grew up im austria). i have been around the world and lived in a number of countries. i felt more welcome in china and even in the US for example than anywhere in europe
    - peterfirefly 4mo ago
      That might be down to your personality... or the language barrier in the case of China (or you were in China before Xi or very early in his reign).
      - em-bee 4mo ago
        unlikely. friendliness is experienced from the first moment you meet someone. my personality can hardly influence that. asians and americans are simply more polite and friendly in their approach to people they have never met. of course if you are unfriendly then that may change their approach. but if that was the measure then people should be friendly to me in europe too. but they aren't. and i don't know what XI has to do with that. politics doesn't affect how people interact. not that quickly anyways. i was around when the big exodus happened in the mid-10s, and after covid china opened up instead of closing down. i don't even need a visa anymore if i just want to visit china. so even by that measure china has become friendlier. but that's not the kind of friendliness i mean.
    - dag100 4mo ago
      > i felt more welcome in china Are you white? Try being non-white. Chinese people, and most Asians - yes, the entire continent, or at least most of it - are deferent to white people. > and even in the US for example than anywhere in europe The US is one of, if not the most, welcoming countries in the world. Additionally, I suppose you probably lived in a city or at least a large town in the US rather than anywhere rural or more closed-off.
AlecSchueler 4mo ago
> Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances. Where I'm from (Northern Ireland) harassing women and attacking emergency services have been part of the culture for as long as I remember. Would you suggest that people arriving should actively take part in these behaviours?
- belorn 4mo ago
  I remember a discussion I had with a English teacher from UK who immigrated to Sweden during the 1990s. They said that in UK, when a government employee would visit a house regarding dept or some other problem, they would bring a large police escort and then they and the neighbourhood would had a big brawl that generally ended with the police winning and then most of the participants would go to the pub. It was just how things worked. The guy were majorly surprised that in Sweden, the government employee could just knock on the door and talk to the person with no police and no brawl. I would assume that if attacking emergency services is the norm in Northern Ireland, so is police escorts of emergency services. That is not the norm in Sweden, through it has become the norm for certain regions where emergency services no longer feel safe going on an emergency call. The downside is that if the police is delayed, so is the emergency service, and naturally the quality of emergency service is reduce in those locations which some people say is a form of discrimination.
- ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
  Northern Ireland is definitely atypical. An English friend of mine moved over there a few years ago as his wife is from there and her family all live in the same area. I can't imagine him being considered as "integrated" for at least a few decades. (My experience with Irish/Northern Irish people is that they're very friendly and welcoming, but I've only been there a couple of times).
- port11 4mo ago
  That’s… a tough one. Bit of a loaded question. I would say “don’t engage in anti-social behaviour regardless of the cultural milieu”, I’m sure NI has much better traditions to partake in?
ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
I'm not saying that people shouldn't want to integrate, I'm saying that "demanding" it is problematic. Imagine grandparents being brought over from a different country and they don't speak the language - should they be forced to attend language school? What level of language ability would be considered the minimum and does that also include reading/writing? By all means provide encouragement and resources so that people can adapt to their new situation, but don't demand it.
- port11 4mo ago
  Yeah, I know. That’s why I say that no one is ever happy with where you set the limit. I think demanding A2 in language is reasonable, for example. Yes, demanding, even if it’s in a reasonably long timespan. We demand much more out of everyone born in the country, don’t we?
  - dnlzro 4mo ago
    I think most liberals have the intuition that laws should apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, and I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from when we talk about immigration. A citizen who doesn't meet those demands imposed on non-citizens (e.g., language, cultural assimilation, etc.) will never be at risk of deportation, simply because they were lucky enough to be born in the country. However, it does seem that this Swedish party is willing to "repatriate" even Swedish-born citizens, so at least they're consistent.
    - pixel_popping 4mo ago
      It doesn't say that at all, Swedish-born citizens means at least one of the parent IS already Swedish, they aren't citizen at birth if none of the parents are swedish and that's just normal almost everywhere in the world. You wouldn't expect your child to be Pakistani if you get birth over there as 2 German individuals.
      - int_19h 4mo ago
        Jus soli is pretty much the norm in the Americas, so it's more of an Old World / New World thing.

hackinthebochs 4mo ago

Why is the burden always on the host nation and never the immigrants?

defrost 4mo ago
Always? Never? There are > 190 countries in the world and many of them require immigrants to meet at least the same criteria for employment and assistance as born citizens.
- hackinthebochs 4mo ago
  Why do people pretend they don't understand context? What do you get out of posting this irrelevant pedantic response?
em-bee 4mo ago
the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker. the majority needs to welcome and support the minority. and it's not that there is no burden on the immigrants. they still have to learn to understand the local language, culture, rule of law, etc... we should learn from each other and take the good from each. the burden for that is on both sides.
- hackinthebochs 4mo ago
  I appreciate the candid response. It shouldn't be so hard for people to just clearly state the premises that motivate their beliefs. >the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker. Is this a universal principle? Does this come with any limits at all? A salient example that comes up often: classrooms tend to have a small handful of extremely disruptive students that ruin the experience for everyone else. The current thinking is to not suspend/expel these kids because they are disadvantaged or whatever. But in doing so the other kids suffer greatly, not to mention the teachers. How do you manage different dimensions of strength/advantage? It is the weakest in society (women, children) that bear a disproportionate burden of allowing large amounts of immigration from third-world countries. Why are the rights of women and children secondary to the rights of immigrants?

hagbard_c 4mo ago

> I don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration Yes, it is reasonable to demand people who come into a country adapt to rules - written and to a certain extent also the unwritten, of which Sweden has many - of that country. When in Rome, act as the Romans. This adaptation will never be 100% but that is not the point, what is most important is that newcomers learn to assimilate to such a level that the natives are open and willing to maybe integrate some parts of the newcomer's culture. People who 'are the last representatives of [their] culture' can write a book about it while becoming part of their new culture since it is clear that their old one did not stand the test of time. They're much better off that way instead of living like cultural fossils for the likes of NPR and PBS to make documentaries about. By all means document what that extinct culture had to offer but life is for the living and culture is the commonly agreed upon set of rules how to live it. Multiculturalism is a pipe dream, something dreamt up by people who listened to one too many version of John Lennon's Imagine. It has been shown not to work time and time again, it makes it harder for people coming in to a new country to assimilate and integrate because there is no clear target to aim for. Culture is not a fixed thing, it evolves through time by adopting new things and getting rid of old customs. Multiculturalism does not call for cultural evolution, it calls for revolution: here's a whole new culture, now deal with it. Revolution hardly every works and when it does it tends to go badly for those on the wrong side of it.

throwa356262 4mo ago

I think it is very reasonable to demand _some_ integration: get a job, pay taxes, learn the language as best as you can, don't do crime. But at the same time, you should not be expected to give up your culture (as long as it is not doing something against the law).

sensanaty 4mo ago

> What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers want to take part I'm an immigrant to the EU/NL (naturalized, now a citizen), and I also lived in Sweden for a short stint. If Swedes are anything, they're open and welcoming, I'd even say too open and welcoming, which is part of why these issues keep cropping up. Some context so I'm not immediately written off as ignorant or as carrying some kind of agenda: I grew up in Indonesia. My family is largely atheist, but we lived in Aceh (look up Qanun Aceh, it's Sharia law territory) and various other places around the country. I've been immersed in Islam, every sect of Christianity, Buddhism (I went to a Buddhist school as a kid), and Balinese Hinduism. I went to an international school with people from literally everywhere, and I'm still close with many of them, scattered across the globe as they now are. I say this to establish that I've actually lived among a wide range of people, cultures, and religions, this isn't an abstract opinion. This isn't unique to EU immigrant communities either, I've seen the exact same pattern in Indonesia. Many (I want to stress: many, not most, but certainly too many) immigrant groups are remarkably insular and resist integrating in any meaningful way, even multiple generations in. They don't learn the language, don't adopt the host country's customs, and make essentially zero effort to become part of the society they live in. This gets worse where there's already a large existing community of the same background, those often calcify into enclaves where you're functionally not living in the host country at all anymore. At a certain point, we also have to admit that some immigrants are the source of the problem. Where I land is this: host countries should expect integration from long-term and permanent residents, and should actively support it via language access, civic education, real investment in helping people become part of the society they're settling into, rather than leaving newcomers to sort it out alone or quietly tolerating permanent parallel communities. What that integration looks like has to be specific to the country in question, because "host culture" isn't one universal template, integrating into Aceh's legal and religious framework is a very different thing from integrating into Sweden's secular, liberal one, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But in both cases, multiculturalism shouldn't mean a one-way street where only the migrant's culture is expected to remain untouched and is treated as a holy thing while the host culture is expected to bend indefinitely until it, too, warps into something it never was. If you've chosen to build a life somewhere, the society you've moved to should welcome you in, but you should also be expected to actually become part of it. We shouldn't have to walk around on eggshells when we say that people should integrate, this should be the expectation for anyone looking to form a permanent life in a country they live in. Refugees are a different case, since they didn't choose displacement, but even there once return is no longer realistic and a person has built a long-term life in the host country, the same logic on integration eventually applies to them as well even if the urgency and framing should differ from voluntary migration. On a side note (and this is more of my own personal problem), I'd rather not see any kind of Sharia-like culture anywhere near me ever again, that crap is stone-age level bullshit that deserves to go extinct forever.