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Although they can't say it out loud of course, I'm sure that most anti-immigration Irish are probably not at all concerned about immigration from Brazil.
You'd be wrong actually - Brazilians have congregated heavily in certain areas of Dublin and are widely viewed as a scourge there (eg, the area I live in, where this attack and subsequent riot took place - literally 100m from my flat).
True, they are more economically productive than the median African or Arab, but have some cultural traits that make them rub Irish people the wrong way. For one, they are more crassly materialistic than even Nigerians, and are heavily involved in every sort of vice trade.
Second, their sexual mores are extraordinarily lax in comparison to the Irish, who would be one of the more chaste European nations - prostitution in Dublin is dominated by Brazilians, and a "Brazilian wife" gives rise to the same sort of sniggering that a "Thai wife" might elicit elsewhere. Brazilians have a reputation as being ruthlessly mercenary in matters romantic, and the visa-marraige-to-ugly-man-until-passport-divorce is a very true pattern I've seen in a mate myself.
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
What's interesting is that Brazilians actually embody many of the traits that Irish people claim to dislike in Americans, with none of the redeeming characteristics whatsoever.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
Very interesting way to pose the question.
I can't speak for the entire nation, but I would think it's a saccharine and narcissistic sentiment and stop consideration there - I wouldn't consider how deeply believed it might be by the speaker.
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"You Irish sure are a contentious lot."
That's interesting, though. I wasn't aware of the Brazilian presence in Ireland at all.
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I'm surprised at this. I haven't heard much bad said about the Brazilians myself but I'm not from Dublin so maybe it's different there. It's a different demographic than the average Brazilian in Ireland but the high population of Brazilians in Gort is considered more of a curiosity than a reason to avoid it.
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It does seem we prefer our own tribal groups and immigration seems to stand as an exemplar of the power of elites to override the common will. I suppose Dublin should celebrate being a modern economy? But to be fair to the obnoxious Brazilians, pejorative things are said about immigrants of any stripe in the early days, but differences tend to become less salient with subsequent generations. The other things you talk about could be more related to a marginal economic existence, rather than hard-grained cultural/ethnic? I'm presuming the average Brazilian family doesn't have mum popping out for nightwork?
Ah look, I'm sure they're fine on their own terms - this isn't a critique any Brazilian should take seriously. I'm describing a mob of Brazilians versus any individual, etc.
Behold: classic Irish obsequiousness and indirectness and backpedalling coming out even on an anonymous board. I'm sure a Brazilian could take an equally good potshot at us - I've heard they find our lack of cosmetic surgery troubling and wrongheaded, for example.
As for poverty explaining vice - I don't think that's the case in an interesting way. Sure, poverty drives people to vice - but which vices, and which first, are culture. Brazilians in Ireland are generally here on bad-faith student visas (they must get a stamp from an "english language school" as a visa condition, making these schools de facto a private arm of Irish migration control - this incentive structure leads to exactly the outcome you'd predict) and I don't see, say, Indian students that dool the same visa scam turning en masse to dealing or prostitution.
Fair play, well I'm certainly not immune to arguments about different cultures having different features and I also believe you can privilege some as being more beneficial in some context.
I'm quite a fan of Fukuyama style political philosophy that looks at things like why India failed to have an imperial/hegemonic national system for very long prior to the English. There are many factors... or, why do English colonies seem to maintain institutional elements of governance better than Spanish ones.
And, purely from hearsay, Brazilians have more fun because they are sexually liberated and more fun-loving...
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True, though some of the ones brave enough to set fire to buses might be.
There’s been a lot of tension between Brazilian couriers and Dublin’s feral youth these last few years. A lot of Brazilians work courier and food delivery jobs and a certain section of young Dubliners like stealing their motorbikes. I don’t know the number but a few Brazilians have been severely injured or killed by joyriders and thieves (or in one case by the police trying to stop the thieves).
It is interesting that in a lot of the videos about youths attacking people in gangs etc coming from Dublin in recent years the perpetrators were white, presumably natives (as first-generation white immigrants would mostly be older than 15/16/17 I imagine). Are these the same types that were rioting against the migrants yesterday?
In much of Western Europe the poor white peripheral underclass is somewhat geographically separated from the largely immigrant underclass in the capital (London, Paris and Berlin all have this dynamic to some extent, e.g. working class white English tend to be rare in Inner London). Is this less the case in Ireland?
I’m not a Dublin native but I think it would be very strange if turned out that the rioters weren’t mostly Irish.
There are lots of videos and newspaper articles about the absolutely wild behaviour of Dublin youth over the years, they’re definitely capable of burning down trams and stealing buses (not so different from Belfast youth in that regard though riots are still very rare in Dublin).
Ah, I meant to ask whether those who rioted yesterday were likely youths otherwise involved in organized crime (like that you discuss).
Yes, the same class of youth is given to trangress in both cases.
Amusingly, there actually was quite a bit of looting by Africans of sports goods stores - presumably caught up in the far-right spirit and violently enthused by the prospect of their own deportation.
This all took place extremely close to my flat (I live in a rough but very convenient/central part of Dublin), and I can attest the escalation was : angry protests by a cross-section of Irish working class (mammies with prams, old people, the youth, etc), followed by garda over-reaction, which tipped the crowd into a fury and attracted red-blooded young proletarians mainly interested in trouble. What's underexplored is that the police were on edge because there had just been a potential terrorist attack, and they were greatly concerned by the prospect of additional attacks.
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I would say most of the people involved in the riot were young Irish men, aged from 14-22. Even saying they were "rioting against the migrants" is giving them too much credit: it mostly seemed like opportunistic destruction and looting for destruction and looting's sake.
It's an interesting question. The suburb Blanchardstown is known for its large black migrant population, and there are many suburbs which have largely retained their white native working-class population (Inchicore, Drimnagh, Ballymun, Whitehall). As far as the city core goes, if you knocked on a random low-income apartment I'd say you'd have about even odds of finding a native working-class family or six Brazilian migrants sharing a bedroom. Dublin is radically different from, say, Paris: there's no equivalent of the banlieues in which a large community of second-generation migrants are geographically isolated from the city centre.
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Insert Planet of the Apes meme, Catholics together stronk.
Up to a point. Slovaks are majority Catholic, but anti-immigration groups in Ireland aren't so keen on them in light of last year's murder of Aisling Murphy, a young teacher, by a Slovak.
Ah now, everyone knows he was a Gypsy, not a Slovak. Ironically it would mainly be over-the-hill, state TV watching, identity-is-citizenship types (ie not far right) that would fail to make that distinction.
And suddenly everyone makes sense.
It is extremely annoying when a someone complains about "Romanians" you don't know if they are just a xenophobe, or whether they are a normie trying to complain about Gypsies in a polite way.
Does anyone really have anything against actual Romanians? I don't think so. It's almost always the latter, and the difficulty is compounded by the High Wokish word for "Gypsy" (that is, "Romani") sounding so like "Romanian"
I agree with you, but when I hung out with Polish people in London there was a lot of grumbling about "Romanians" and I didn't know if this was bog-standard Gypsy hate or if there was some local derby kind of hatred I was missing the context of.
It is also a premise of the "Brexit was about immigration and so the referendum is a mandate to reduce it" crowd - which includes most of the populist right of the Conservative Party, as well as Nigel Farage - that normies were opposed to Eastern European immigration (including non-gypsy Romanians) and that this was why they voted for Brexit. I think these guys are wrong and that there is a reason both leave campaigns (Vote Leave was Cummings, Leave.EU was Farage) focussed their anti-immigration messages on Muslim immigrants.
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