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I don't agree with you but I appreciate this post because it perfectly summarizes the reactionary/alt-right position on immigration, which you've neatly condensed into this sentence:
I don't know if you're American or European. As an American, I think plenty of people from all over the world can assimilate and become culturally Southern, Midwestern, etc. I think this because I've met second and third generation Americans who behave much more like their white American counterparts than people in the country their parents and grandparents came from, and these differences go well beyond language. I've met Hispanic Catholics who I feel a much closer affinity to because of our shared faith than white atheist liberals who I'm genetically closer to. And so on.
But I'm interested in hearing other European perspectives on this. I know @Folamh3 is Irish, I think @Stefferi and @2rafa are European? Sorry I don't know more.
From Europe, Poland to be more specific.
For me "American Midwest family with Germanic ancestry they don't even know about is more German than they will ever be" is absolutely laughable position.
No, just because you can trace some Polish ancestry does not make you Pole. You have no genetic memory etc. You are welcome in my country but if you start talking in English (not knowing any Polish and having meme-level understanding of Polish culture) how you are Polish then I am surely not going to agree with you.
Just because your grandfather could say 10 words in Polish, 5 of them being curses does not make you Polish. If all your grandfathers and grandmothers were Polish but you lost language, lost culture that makes you white, not Polish. (though if someone wants to recover that, it is entirely welcome to do so and I would be happy to help if I would encounter such person)
I have quite high bar what I would expect before I would consider someone to be Polish. But at least in theory it seems possible to me for someone green/yellow/black/purple/German to become Polish. And there were cases of this happening.
And yes, specially for our resident SSman: many people with Jewish ancestry were Poles, some of them were Poles practising Jewish religion, for some of them they were distinguishable only by genealogy and surnamed. (some failed to do so or had completely distinctive cultural identify). Though nowadays it is extremely rare as German murdered millions of Poles and Jews after invading. And while under communist occupation many were kicked out. Or preferred to escape from communist paradise.
And we had and have Poles with German, Belarusians, Russian, Ukrainian ancestry. Maybe if you would look really hard you would find some Poles with other skin colours (note: I can easily find some prominent people with Polish citizenship which are yellow/black, this does not make them Poles).
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I've seen a lot of Indians in the South. I've never seen a culturally Southern Indian. It would probably just make me laugh. It's not them, and they are not us.
But I'll admit that my motivation is not "We must preserve Southern Culture!" My motivation is directing ethnogenesis in a eugenic direction, and I am far more terrified of my descendants being half-Indian (or at least the macro-effect of such an ethnogenesis in aggregate) than I am of Southern Culture going away. I am more concerned with Europe becoming Arab than I am with German culture per se.
That's what we've been arguing about‽
The way things are going (assuming humanity survives at all), a century from now we will be able to take the best genes from every branch and twig of the human family tree, and splice them into anyone who wants them!
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In my effortpost from last week, I talked about the "respectable" media's reluctance to mention anything about the identity of the perpetrator who committed the shocking knife attack which precipitated the November riots in 2023. Some outlets, in an effort to disguise the fact that he was Algerian, described him as "born outside of Ireland but an Irish citizen" or similar.
The clear intention was to give the impression that the perpetrator was "one of our own", so racism was misplaced. But of course, an anti-immigration activist would counter - the fact that he was an Irish citizen makes it even worse! It'd be one thing if he snuck into the UK, took a ship to Belfast then crossed the border into the south and applied for "asylum" as a "refugee", and committed this attack while he was in the legal limbo of waiting for his asylum application to be processed. But no - this is a man who has already jumped through all the hoops of applying for Irish citizenship, was thoroughly vetted, and still went on to commit a shocking and completely unprovoked crime like this. If a nutcase like this can pass the vetting process, clearly it's not stringent enough.
I don't know. I certainly believe that second-generation immigrants to Ireland can be fully assimilated (I've met plenty of women of Chinese descent who sound more Irish than me; I work with a woman who has at least one Algerian parent and didn't clock her as anything other than Irish until she told me, although her name was a dead giveaway in retrospect; I once dated a Polish girl who sounded Irish from top to bottom), but I have no firsthand experience of a first-generation immigrant fully assimilating.
I should switch news providers, because that's still much better than what I saw (at 1:05): "Police say false information quickly spread through social media, that the attacker might have been a foreigner, and that appeared to fuel the frenzy of destruction that followed". Their earlier article isn't much better: "The violence began after rumours circulated that a foreign national was responsible for an attack outside a Dublin school on Thursday afternoon. Authorities haven't disclosed the suspect's nationality."
I couldn't find any followup articles offering more information.
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