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Notes -
Speaking as someone who is British I would consider someone a "recent" immigrant if their family has only lived in Britain for the past few hundred years. Once you're past the three hundred year mark I think you probably have some right to be called local.
Even if you sincerely hold this view, surely you understand why it looks like disingenuous special pleading to nearly everyone else?
The line "huh, they're English the second they sneak in on a truck, but I'm still a Colonizer living on Stolen Land after 300 years?" has been going around. So any disingenuousness goes both ways.
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I'd be willing to bet money that if you did a textual analysis of every use of the word "recent" as used by British people you'd find that easily 95% of the use of the word is used for lengths of time less than 10 years. Probably more. Challenge: can you even find a single example of the word being used, in a politics-adjacent way, to mean 20 years or more? I honestly don't think you can, not without breaking out the history books. The modern debate is one with the context of politics, not history. While I realize "history" is an extremely slippery term, there's a reason we don't really start to use it until the 20-30 year mark. The distinction? If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say "politics" is implicitly something you can do something about, and history is not (and history is also something you need a little distance from to gain greater benefits of hindsight as well as some extra objectivity). Although anecdotally that window seems to be narrowing (I've seen some "historical"-oriented analysis of events as recent as 15 years ago).
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