Not every culture can integrate, not every culture is a step "forward". Also, your examples are quite weak
1. Paganism was not doing too well by the time Christianity became official.
2. Belgium is a joke country (sorry!) that still has a divided population based on the language they speak. Hardly a success case.
3. Americans speaking Spanish also resulted in losing native languages and cultures. It might be okay to accept it, but the implications in your case are obvious, and it definitely would deserve a fair bit of debate whether we're okay with that.
4. Right, because the Reconquista was famously a period of peace and prosperity...
If these are the arguments FOR massive immigration then don't be surprised the vast majority of the public is against it.
I don’t know man. This idea of certain cultures being so distant that they cannot be integrated with others sounds a bit alien to me. If anything, we (all the different cultures in this planet) are the result of a vast amount of mixing over the centuries. We probably don’t notice it anymore (proof that the mix has worked wonders) and we think we all are so good because “our” culture, “our” values. I mean, if something so profound such as religion was literally imported to America, anything is possible. Sometimes I wish we were invaded by aliens 100% different from us in every aspect, so that we realised once and for all that we all humans just are and feel the same.
Even relatively harmless things like haram vs non-haram meats can cause a huge struggle, yet alone other more nuanced, complex cultural issues.
Also should we really be accepting of cultures that openly and unashamedly want to harm marginalized groups such as anyone who identifies as LGBT? Getting some new recipes or whatever (as it appears that's the direction you're thinking of) is one thing, having people decapitating school teachers [1] because of a drawing (which itself was based on a lie) is a whole different thing which nobody sane should be in support of in literally any context, ever.
this is the most holier-than-thou (literally and figuratively) broad strokes opinion phrased as if it's a nuanced opinion about cultures.
i think it's self-evident from history and society that "importing" "barbarism" into "society"* is how we even started doing things like not unashamedly harming marginalized groups in the West. if i'm not mistaken most christian sects, whether in europe or america have had various levels of being okay with ostracizing and harming queer and trans people until very recent times. your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time, especially using the common scapegoat of other cultures taking longer to catch up on LGBT rights.
fascinating that other people's systems of being is "barbarism" and yours is "society". and thus, it's reasonable that most of the world thinks american society was barbaric with their deep rooted slavery and racism, and european society barbaric with their violent colonial extractionism defining much of their past and present.
> your comment smacks incredibly of thinking only western white civilizations are capable of overcoming "barbarism" and evolving into a more just society for people over time...
I'm neither a Westerner, nor am I (entirely) White (1/2 Serbian, if you count it as white (you'd be surprised), 1/2 Indonesian). I also grew up in and lived in Indonesia the majority of my life. Nowhere did I state that only Western societies are the good ones, either, I tend to believe that Taoist and Buddhist countries have a better track record both in the modern day and in the past for the most part.
I'd appreciate if you didn't build a strawman of me, because I'm probably not the person you're imagining in your head. It's shocking, but people outside the west can also believe the west is doing things right and would like them to continue doing so, often because of the cultures they've observed back home.
No, what I consider barbarism is a system of being in which it's okay to commit a brutal beheading because the victim dared to show some drawings of a guy you call a Prophet. Or the one that throws people they don't like off of buildings. Or the one that buries people in the ground and chucks rocks at their heads until they die. Or preventing little girls from attending primary and high schools.
How many beheadings of innocent people exercising their freedoms provided by the nation they were born in are we okay with until we finally admit, maybe we shouldn't be letting them play in our nice garden if they're just going to kick the flowers and rip out the roots?
I grew up in Indonesia, and the entire reason I'm in the West is because of these types of people who'd do such heinous things. And guess what? The Europeans welcomed me with wide open arms, whereas many of my own countrymen would have me grievously harmed due to not being a follower of their hideous beliefs.
it was evident to me from your other comments that you yourself are an immigrant to the west, but it was also evident that you believed the west is in a better place because "it is doing things right", and therefore other places (including where you came from) are doing things wrong. my comment was less about who you are (ethnically, passport-wise, etc), but about the cultural superiority you ascribe to the west with your comment (which many non-white non-westerners do). i myself am an american citizen by immigration, probably for similar reasons to yourself, after having lived approx half my life in 4 other countries, but i don't know how relevant that is either. that these countries have welcomed you and i with open arms doesn't reinforce your opinion that they won't harm someone who didn't follow their beliefs, it just so happens that we follow their beliefs and so we get along. in fact, your comment is literally arguing for not welcoming people who don't follow your beliefs (assuming they are of violent intent).
this discussion imo is far too complex for a HN comment thread, but your depiction of "barbarism" is deeply rooted in western narratives omitting details such as many people from those places also find those atrocities terrible, and they are perpetuated because of a few powerful bigoted people and lots of propaganda. when atrocities are justified with propaganda, i think it's crude to think the people or the societies are barbaric as much as the leaders (usu. religious ones) are. western societies moved past honor killings, feudalism, slavery, concentration camps and other barbaric practices not-so-long ago, and to a great extent because of the resources they extracted from other countries during that time afforded them to bandwidth to focus on equitable societies. following that, wanting to isolate people of those other societies from also becoming part of these more equitable societies by precluding them as barbaric and therefore shouldn't be allowed here, imo, is what is barbaric.
the contemporary west has also repeatedly shown itself capable of direct barbarism too, like brutally levelling a school of innocent children in Pakistan or drone-striking innocents as collateral damage with no restraint. or what, is unjustified murder & cruelty only barbaric when done on your own soil, and fair game done in someone else's country with citizen tax dollars?
also somewhat unrelated but yes, serbian is white insofar as they genetically present features mostly associated with western white society (light-colored eyes, hair color other than black, caucasian bone structure) so without considering family circumstances/political background, that's white, at least on observation. of course with your mixed heritage i understand this may not be true of you specifically.
Also, it wasn't solely the 6 teens, it was also their parents and their communities at large outraged about what the teacher did and wanting his head on a spike (show a drawing of Muhammad). Not to forget the spark of the outrage, the girl who was skipping class and lied about what the teacher did, which instigated it all.
There was also that small Charlie Hebdo thing, and the Quran burning in Sweden, and countless other similar events over the years in Europe alone.
I was born and grew up in Indonesia, and the crap that was happening in Aceh, one of the only islands in Indonesia that practices Sharia law whereas the rest of the country is more secular, churns the stomach. I have no problems with Islam for the most part, but proponents of Sharia law are truly sociopathic monsters that have no place in the 21st century.
Freedom of choice? You realize we're talking about a man who got beheaded because of showing drawings of Muhammad to his students, right? (Ignoring the fact that the instigator of the whole event lied about what he actually did)
Do I not have the freedom of choice of not wanting people who will murder over something like that in the same country as myself?
> Do you believe you are presenting an honest appraisal of both the upside risk and downside risk of immigration?
I never said I'm anti-immigration. I'm an immigrant mysely, soon to be a naturalized citizen of my host country after years of hard work at embracing its culture and traditions as much as I can.
I am, however, anti-immigration if the kind of people we're talking about are the types of people that go around beheading people, regardless of their reasoning.
I’m talking about immigration as a haystack, but you seem to think that we can know in advance who the needles are.
Are you under the impression that we can tell barbarians apart from other immigrants and that we still let them in the country?
It sounds like you are listening to propaganda media and have no idea what is actually happening with immigration dynamics right now.
The barbarians are all religious. The only way to reduce the chance of terrorism to near zero is to either stop all immigration or to stop immigration of religious people. We don’t, because this country was founded by religious zealots and because we value freedom.
I've seen this a bit throughout the discussion so let's make it explicit: how on earth would someone socialized in a world where women are second tier, murders in the name of protecting the family honor, sidelining official judiciary systems, putting religion over the state, rape, sexual assault and on an on integrate well with a country that has totally different values (i.e. is a child of enlightenment)? How does that work? We see again and again, that it does not work. We (=Germany) have plenty of statistics to offer. Why some countries (muslim countries btw) have a way higher part of that and others don't.
How is the culture of Talibans compatible with western morale? How? It's just not. We aren't all the same, that's just ignoring the truth of how the world works and is plenty naive. That doesn't mean that these people are lesser beings, but that the gap between "them" and "us" (which is a culture thing btw, not a gene thing) is bigger. And that also means that it's not equidistant throughout. We're not all socialized equally.
40% of suspects don't have a German passport while the base group is 15% relative to the whole country.
Opinons like yours prevent successful immigration discussions because you have the wrong foundation. That prevents us from having a) a proper integration discussion b) solving current issues and c) creating a working immigration system.
If these are the arguments FOR massive immigration then don't be surprised the vast majority of the public is against it.