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Ameribro here. I've hosted a German exchange kid. She was really, really worried about immigration and "preserving German culture". I pointed out to her that:
Culture is not a fixed thing, it's always drifting a little bit, with or without immigrants. That's why old people always complain about how different everything is.
Germany is actually younger than the US as a state by about a century, and contemporary Germany has really only existed since either the end of WW2 or the fall of the Soviet Union, depending on your view. (IMO, the collapse of East Germany is non-trivial. Her mom was an East German and described to us how they had an entirely separate culture with different groceries and everything and all that just vaporized into nothing when the wall fell, replaced with West German culture almost overnight). So, what does it really even mean to be defending German culture?
There's always hardship when a new group of people arrive, but over time you usually end up with something that's better than what you had before if you can learn to embrace it. US culture has, in spite of our issues with racism, tangibly benefitted from immigration over the centuries.
She wasn't receptive to it. A lot of Europeans who hold anti-immigratiom views insist that it's different for Europe when they have immigrants than it is for the US. I've yet to have one persuasively explain why that's true and not just whiny exceptionalism.
I mostly agree with your conclusion, but this is a very american (I.e. ignorant) response to her concern and i am not surprised she wasnt receptive. I think you underestimate the difference between a country like yours (which has always been a 'salad bowl' of cultures united by a commitment to liberalism) and mine (Germany, which is essentially a big tribe of tribes). This difference is even more stark if you look at a place like Denmark.
Here are a few of your points that gave me this impression:
Her concern is (to me) obviously independent of the state we happen to live under. Germaneness is not tied to a political entity. East Germans were German, Volga Germans are German and the German speaking people under the hre were German. ("German" Americans are not German btw.) This also makes your comment about
baffling (to me).
The us is in many ways a much worse country than Germany (or almost any EU country). I don't see why we should strive to emulate that model.
I think the question that really needs to be answered is how you plan on enforcing cultural normality. If, as you say, Germans have had a strong identify regardless of historical causes and conditions, it sounds like they've figured their culture out throughout the decades and centuries without someone pointing a gun at them over it. So then why should the force and violence of the government be necessary now, and to what extent? Are we just talking arresting brown people, or should we start arresting anyone who speaks something besides German in public, since they're eroding the culture too?
I also wanted to respond to your remark about emulating the US. You don't give rich old white men enough credit, they've managed to turn the country into a shambling wreck all while keeping everyone else locked out of governance. Maybe if we'd had those other voices, we wouldn't have Donald Trump soliciting a billion dollar bribe to roll back all of our environmental protections.
The fuck are you on about.
If you want to get a handle on this I suggest you start with concepts such as the assimilation capacity of a population as well as the possible speed of different kinds of natural cultural drift. If you want to avoid to avoid fuelling xenophobic ressentiment, what you need to make sure is that cultural drift caused by new arrivals is lower than what people accept, in that case people become more tolerant of that kind of shift, though of course that has a limit (and that's fine). OTOH if you exceed it, people become less tolerant of shifts. In other words: Culture is a non-newtonian fluid. You create resistance by pushing too hard, if you go in gently there very well might be no resistance at all.
The erm force applied to that non-newtonian fluid is more or less number of arrivals multiplied by germane cultural difference multiplied by economical impact. When Germans flock to Sweden the Swedes worry about those "closed up and private" people, they're somewhat taken aback by directness but secretly also somewhat glad that there's someone actually complaining in public, not just in private. In the numbers that we're talking about the Swedes aren't worried in cultural terms, though there's some gripes among some around housing prices in rural areas (not among the Swedes selling the houses, of course). Berliners are way more worried about Swabian arrivals.
And, really, let's take Sweden as an example because they've been so... Swedish about the whole thing. Over decades their immigration worked just fine, they had a certain number and that number didn't exceed the assimilation capacity, and then Swedes said "we are the best so of course we'll take in more" and more came and assimilation failed -- and the Swedes, being Swedes, never complained in public. It's a high-trust environment, of course you trust others, even if government policy led to, one way or the other, segregation: Arrivals live in one place, native Swedes in another. Which then makes it even harder for the new arrivals to even acculturate much less assimilate, leading to more segregation, leading to more difficulties. At some point a dam broke and Swedes stopped complaining in private and complained in public -- the backlash. Which led to people who were born in Sweden from perfectly assimilated parents suddenly found themselves on the outside of their own culture.
If, instead their politicians had started early saying "we need to actively work against that segregation, we need to change our public housing policy to make sure that neighbourhoods are mixed, and if that doesn't suffice we need to limit the number of new arrivals" things would've went very differently -- such a policy would have increased assimilation capacity. But that would've implied things such as Sweden not being perfect which is unthinkable to a Swede... at least to say aloud. Fucking swots.
What I'm on about is that there are plenty of people who would be quite happy to make it the police's business to enforce cultural norms. Governments probably should do more to ensure plentiful housing, but assimilation is something that just happens over time. The US has had its own assimilation woes many, many, many times, it's never been the happy melting pot we tell the world we are. We've had cultural enclaves and backlashes and all of that, but what always happens is that the assimilation takes hold within a generation or two, regardless of how the older generations might feel about it. It's something people are quite capable of figuring out for themselves, without getting the cops involved.
Imo, people should be free to live and work where they please. Borders are the tools of tyrants, imo, but I don't think we're ready for that conversation.
And it's going to stay that way, or become worse, if migration is mismanaged.
There is no political border surrounding Franconia. Well maybe district borders, but those are fuzzy and approximate when it comes to culture. Noone is stopping anyone from crossing in or out. But if suddenly Bavarians, culturally Bavarian that is not just as in the state, started to mass-migrate into Franconia boy would you see backlash: Franconians are perfectly entitled to want to stay Franconian instead of becoming Bavarian. Different language, different traditions, different mentality, different majority religion, different Idendidäd.
Yes, I'm familiar with what you're talking about about. We've had similar backlashes even within the US before. The thing is, it's something people can, have, and do figure out without arresting anyone. People are smart and generally want to do what they believe to be the right thing and have a peaceful life, that's broadly true across our species.
You're the only one around here talking about arresting people. Maybe you share -- culturally -- more in common with some people that you dislike than you realise or you wouldn't be preoccupied like that.
As I said elsewhere, I'm speaking as a citizen of a country who has repeatedly and severely fucked up, and continues to do so, in the hopes that I might save someone else the embarrassment of becoming a citizen of such a country. To wit, I must ask how you plan on enforcing immigration controls without law enforcement.
Oh no. You weren't talking about border guards, you were talking about arresting people for having brown skin, or speaking different languages, for the "crime" of "eroding the culture".
Heck I erode Italy's culture every time I'm there simply by being convinced that pineapple on pizza is a perfectly valid thing to do. So far, none of them ever suggested arresting me.
Saying "I want cops but the difference is that this time they're the good guys and don't hurt anyone" doesn't really move the needle for me. You can't use the power of the state to use its force on people only it's totally rainbows and sunshine this time.
Who said that? Who, here, aside from you, is talking about cops? Are those cops here in the room with us right now?
You, unless you want the law to enforce itself via magic. So, again, how are you enforcing these immigration rules without cops? Oh, wait, by calling cops "guards"? Call them the rainbow patrol for all I care, a cop by any other name is still a cop.
We do have borders, yes. We have an asylum process, we have an immigration process, we have a process for working permits, we have a naturalisation process, it's all very well regulated and yes you can get through all of that without ever coming into contact with anyone in a uniform, short of a border guard.
What we don't, and won't, have is what you propose, and that is arresting American tourists on the subway for loudly speaking English. Or making it more difficult to open a Nigerian restaurant than a German one. That's all your imagination, you've been told so multiple times by multiple people, and you still don't seem to be able to understand it.
I want to be clear: I couldn't give a crap about whether Americans get arrested. Nationalities are a construct made up by tyrants; people are people, and they deserve to not come to harm regardless of where they happened to be born.
So, it sounds like you're proposing, what, no changes? What exactly is it, then, that people want to in order to deal with immigration, if not more cops and more aggressive laws?
There's some room for better policies, integration courses etc but much of it is simply the east not being as experienced at integrating people combined with them still feeling fucked over by reunification.
In such a situation it then doesn't exactly help to build a centre for 200 asylum seekers in a village with 300 inhabitants. Don't recall the actual numbers but there's been a couple of these "WTF would you ever do that" situations. Might even have been AfD fucks doing that they certainly aren't above employing accelerationist tactics. Might've been inexperience and carelessness. Might've been a bureaucrat who has beef with the district administrator.
Oh: We need to re-work the history curricula. Make room for things like the Armenian genocide. Mandatory language development screening for kids and if necessary mandatory Kindergarten are already in place in a couple of states, it's generally a good idea not just for immigrant kids, you don't want kids to start primary school at a disadvantage. Muslims definitely should continue the process of naturalising Islam, that is, continue the move away from source-country Islams (plural) towards a domestic one. Can't find English articles about the discussion/process within Germany right now but this might be of interest. Bit out of date it's been taking up speed but it's giving an overview.
Besides the point. Immigration does not necessarily lead to "bad" legislation.