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This is a typical unsupported progressive truism. As I have spoken about many times, I have lived my entire life in one of the most racially-diverse cities in the entire world, and it has absolutely not made me friendlier to certain groups among whom I have spent quite a bit of time.
I agree that continued exposure to various groups helps you separate justified stereotypes from unjustified stereotypes; if a common wignat talking point was “Mexicans are lazy”, I would know enough to dismiss this as the ignorant prejudice of someone who hasn’t met very many Mexicans. However, the wignat talking point “blacks are, on average, lazy and hostile” has actually been borne out many times in my experience, so simply living around this particular group of “people different from me” has done the opposite of making me more friendly toward them.
A "truism" is something that's obviously and boringly true, not something that's false.
Except when it means the opposite. English is great that way: https://imgur.com/2t7jXIz
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I mean, sure, nothing works 100% of the time. There are still people upset over Brown vs. Board of Education out there after all.
But, I'm not talking about woke self-hating white liberals like myself celebrating the end of the white majority or whatever.
I'm talking about the fact that your median Texan exurban Trump voter in a middle class neighborhood is far less likely to freak out over non-white people moving to their neighborhood than frankly, even pretty centrist to center-left European's when it comes to Muslim's or hell, Romani people. If you look at polling, even now in a fairly anti-immigrant swing of thermostatic opinion, there's still fairly decent numbers of Trump voters about immigrants in society and such, and even now, the less/more/same numbers on immigration are still far better in the US than basically anywhere in Europe.
The same thing happened with gay people - it went from only freaks in San Francisco or whatever to oh hey, that's sad that gay people are dying to oh yeah, my cousin's daughter is a lesbian to oh, Dave in the office is gay - weird, he didn't seem it to Mary & Alice bought the Newman's house and so on.
Integration is key, and ironically, America is much better at it than Europe in a variety of ways. In part because we just got a whole lot more non-white people, but also because we're not wedded to 'my family has lived within 10 miles of this village since before basically recorded history and that's the only true way to be x' or whatever the Euros have their hang ups about. Meanwhile, in America - show up, pay taxes, get a job, and learn to cheer or boo the Cowboys depending on where you live, and welcome to America. Pass the burger. We even threw on some veggie ones for Vivek and Priya even though I'd never eat any.
Same thing will and is already happening with trans people. At an accelerated pace, but partly because the numbers are so small, only conservatives stuck in very blue areas and grifting online right-wing entertainers care all that much in reality. Polling showed in a post-mid-2022 midterms that it was the least important issue among Republican voters.
Has it occurred to you that the difference might not be purely a matter of Europeans’ irrational “hangups” or “freakouts”, but might have a great deal to do with the actual nature of the specific immigrants each respective society is receiving? Over the last two decades, Europe has received a massive amount of unvetted, mostly unemployable “refugees” from the Middle East and Africa - many of whom are, plainly, the absolute criminal dregs of their countries of origin. Crime rates, unemployment, welfare usage, and other hallmarks of extreme dysfunction and parasitism are massively high among these people. So perhaps when Europeans are angry about their ever-increasing numbers, it’s not because Europeans are committed to the sort of extreme petty localism you attribute to them, but rather because they are accurately observing the extent to which these people are different in dangerous and overwhelmingly negative ways. (Hell, you brought up Gypsies and implied that Europeans irrationally “freak out” when a community of Gypsies shows up in town. Actually, the Gypsies have been consistently and widely reviled in Europe for many centuries now, because of their well-known extreme proclivity for stealing. In what sense is Gypsies’ lack of integration due to Europe “just not being as good at it as America is,” versus being a result of the actual qualities of Gypsies themselves and their compatibility/ability to be integrated?
As for why American appears to be “better at integrating immigrants”, again, so much of this is a result of the fact that for at least the last few decades, immigrating to America from anywhere other than Mexico was really difficult. America could be more restrictive about the types of people it let in, because it actually had the ability and political will to get rid of the people whom it didn’t want. This was not always the case! In fact, America’s “ability to successfully integrate immigrants” - again, I love the way this concept places the entire onus on the host society to integrate the immigrants, rather than on the immigrants to integrate themselves - has fluctuated pretty wildly throughout its history.
Famously, during the Gilded Age, America was receiving huge numbers of dirt-poor and very culturally-backward peasants from places like Italy, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crime rates in these communities were very high; violent crime skyrocketed in many American cities due to the rise of organized crime networks staffed nearly entirely by immigrants. Political extremism, including acts of outright terrorism committed by immigrants, also increased massively. Additionally, with the lack of any meaningful welfare state at the time, huge numbers of these immigrant men eventually just went home. They didn’t have any way to sustain themselves financially in America, so they packed it up and returned to Sicily or whatever. In 1924 America passed a very draconian immigration bill, and it is only after this point did unassimilated ethnic enclaves begin to dissolve in America due to their inability to sustain themselves with new immigration.
We are now seeing the beginning stages of a similar wave of extremely low-quality immigration start to take hold in America, due to the absolutely minimal border enforcement of the Biden administration. Hordes of immigrant men from all around the world - Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America - are streaming across the open border, and unlike a century ago, they will have a welfare state to utilize and the protection of powerful lobbies preventing their removal, allowing them to remain unemployed and thoroughly unassimilated. I predict that we will see a rapid shift to European levels of anti-immigrant sentiment as the new reality of this style of bio-trash immigration - the third world emptying its prisons into the United States - starts to dawn on people. (In fact, recent polling showing that a majority of Americans, including like 40% of Democrats, supporting mass deportations is strong evidence in favor of my prediction.)
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It is very convenient to compare middle class non-white people of unspecified race and culture to specifically muslims and Roma of unspecified class. Now try comparing middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians to american acceptance of low class blacks from their own country.
I haven't encountered anything worrying about middle class european acceptance of middle class indians and east asians.
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This is like a 2024 neoliberal Leave It To Beaver headcanon of race relations in America.
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I feel obliged to note that the usual RW retort is that it wasn't presence that accomplished the shift with LGB, but rather the long march through the institutions and in particular the media and education system.
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In general though, whites who live or have lived in multicultural cities are more likely to be on the left regarding immigration than those who live in places with much lower immigration levels. It’s possible to argue that this is because those who don’t like it leave, of course, but that isn’t enough to explain the whole effect.
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Indeed. Plus, when you do meet an exceptional member of a minority group you are just as often (more in my experience) to have the reaction of, "what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?"
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