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Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

Since the late 300s there was a repeating pattern where German tribes would want to become part of Rome (initially, fleeing the Huns), and the Romans would respond with acts of astonishing racism.

The first revolt of 376 began when the Romans reneged on land grants to the Goths (who were refugees from the Huns) and allowed them to starve. The proximal cause of its fall were anti-German riots in the Roman capital, where the wives and children of the German troops were massacred; leading the Gothic leader Alaric's troops to openly revolt where they were previously loyal to Rome.

So the fall of Rome has a lesson about the treatment and acceptance of foreigners, but maybe not the one you had in mind.

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Another way to look at it: anti-german riots errupted because politicians ignored the public's disdain for immigration, causing the goths to rebel.

I still have the 90's headlines of burning refugee homes in my mind. After the german unification, the east was economically devastated. People had lost their jobs and their national identity, and things were bleak for years to come. So they turned to right-wing ideas, being Nazi was cool for a while. Plus, they had no every day experience with strangers - the iron curtain made sure of that.

Now you could say that these people were a bunch of facist idiots, and some of them certainly were.

But you could also say that it was very irresponsible of politicians to build refugee homes in these areas into this political climate. The reality is that humans are less willing to share if they feel threatened already and are in bad situation themselves.

Most people are unwilling to share even if they have it good. Much of Western Europe today is fairly wealthy, yet we're unwilling to accept refugees.

Being wealthy and not feeling threatened is two distinct things. You can have one, none, or both.

You can easily persuade people who feel safe to share in order to create safety net. When you can't, this means you have a problem with safety which you should be solving instead of blaming people.

Nope. Look at europe, walk through any major city, be it London, Geneva, Paris, Stockholm etc. You will see huge amounts of immigrants, some naturalized already, some not there yet but trying. You'll find only few places so open to migrants in this world, we are doing our part of sharing, continuously. But this is not the way world can be fixed in long term.

What is of of main issues now (at least to me & people around me) is (potential) pace of immigration and its potential to grow exponentially - we don't have endless space to absorb as many economical migrants as there are/might be. Our economies are not in super good shape, unemployment is bad in many places (or outright horriblein southern parts, 50% unemployment of youth has/will have devastating effect on future shape of these economies).

If they could financially and there would be +- guarantee of success, half of Africa (say 300 million) and massive amounts of Asia would stand up and try to come here, leaving their dysfunctional home countries. And we all know that there are some really bad places to be born to. For example, many many young people from North Africa, ie Morocco are trying this either via boats or turkey/greece border for many years already.

If somebody takes few 1000s kms journey through 10 different sovereign, stable and peaceful states and decides to end up in say Germany, he is not refugee fleeing for his life - that status ends after he willingly leaves first safe country. I don't blame them, I would do the same if I had the option, but let's call things with proper names. And there are some limits for economical migrants of how much our societies can/are willing to absorb.

Another topic is a major failure of immigrants to integrate in the past and accept european values (there is plenty of exceptions, but they are what they are, exceptions). But that's a topic on its own, and highly controversial one.

I am for example economical migrant myself, albeit only within europe (Slovakia -> Switzerland). First thing I did is to accept all the rules of my new country, don't expect that world will bend for my needs and expectations, and just be part of society, learn the language, etc. I am still amazed how Swiss are tolerant when their tiny country is overrun by foreigners.

I mean you could be right, everything is relative. But what are you comparing to? Japan? Qatar? Saudi?

Immigrants aren't homogenous, so the opposition isn't either.

Not sure if the concept of Hirja existed during Rome, but you might want to look into it.

I don't want to live near islamists and my mother doesn't want to be called a whore in arabic for not wearing hijab - yeah my mum speaks Arabic.

You can't refrain from the fact that majority of the refugees are islamists in a sense that they deem apostasy as a crime and homosexuality punishable by death.

> You can't refrain from the fact that majority of the refugees are islamists in a sense that they deem apostasy as a crime and homosexuality punishable by death.

I am 97% sure you completely made up that statistic.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...

I am pretty sure you need to read up. I grew up in a muslim ghetto. My parents were both born in muslim countries.

As a math guy I am sure you can figure out that any percentage of 1.6 billion sure is a large chunk of people.

Western Europe is about the only place that's accepting refugees. Where do you think the top places that are accepting refugees are?

"Maybe" also it doesn't mean anything:

From the absence of X during the fall of an empire it doesn't follow that the presence of X will protect from the fall of another empire.

The set of such X where X is not in the set of the policies of the fallen empire is infinite.

But didn't pluralistic and non pluralistic empires come and go back then? Did pluralism or non pluralism actually make a difference in the decline of empires?

If anything the Chinese who were ruthless in rule were able to keep things going the longest.

China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as "Chinese."

So that's how they're down to only 95 percent Han having driven the Hmong, Turkiks and many others out? As I understand it they barely tolerate the Manchurians.

FWIW, I'm 1/8 Manchurian even though my birth certificate says "Han" and the Qing Dynasty, which ended in 1911, was ruled by Manchurians.

China was the only nation that welcomed refugees fleeing from pogroms in one era and fleeing concentration camps in another era, when nations like the U.S. would not let those ships dock.

It's just unfortunate that the U.S. tends to be rather selective in what gets taught in schools.

Side note: you can tell something about the inclusivity of a culture by how children of mixed race are treated and labelled by the broader society. Historically, if you're part-Han (a term which originated from the Han Dynasty to be an inclusive term that described all the diverse people from the diverse nations that comprised it), then you're Han (part of the mainstream, dominant culture). Historically, in the U.S., children of mixed race get categorized with the less-mainstream less-dominant minority culture, with all the lack of privilege that accompany that. This sort of edge case may seem minor to those who don't live it, but as an edge case myself, I feel that it's indicative of how the dominant culture views me.

It is problematic that in the US people are too absolute in some things. In this case black and white. Even if someone is mostly white, say 3/4, they're considered black by both whites and blacks, for the most part.

But interestingly in Brazil and other places where there are more shades of either, still people suffer the same or more injustice due to race compared to the U.S.

> China was the only nation that welcomed refugees fleeing from pogroms in one era and fleeing concentration camps in another era, when nations like the U.S. would not let those ships dock.

China didn't have the state capacity to control immigration during the Republic of China and it didn't have the desire during the Qing dynasty.

> Side note: you can tell something about the inclusivity of a culture by how children of mixed race are treated and labelled by the broader society.

Waiguoren! Laowai! Name keaide hunxue!

I'm sorry, the idea that China is less racist than the west is hilarious. It's pretty easy for white people but black people get discriminated against endlessly.

Note that I did not claim China doesn't have racism. But by personally comparing my experience growing up Asian in the U.S. (having lived in non-diverse small Midwest towns for several years) with the experience of Caucasian friends who spent some childhood years in China, I'd really have to say: they got a much, much better experience as far as race is concerned.

And every time that I have confronted a Chinese person about prejudice against black people, I also asked them where their preconceptions came from. Without exception, they tell me that they have no first-hand experience, but they get all their information from American movies, whose makers they assume to know more about American culture than they do.

But if you actually want to compare relative levels of racism quantitatively (which is hard because there are so many confounding factors), I challenge you to compare the incarceration rate of African Americans in the U.S vs. African Chinese in China.

> China was the only nation that welcomed refugees fleeing from pogroms in one era and fleeing concentration camps in another era, when nations like the U.S. would not let those ships dock.

Sources please, otherwise this sounds like an usual BS propaganda. One real example to contradict - in WWII, Switzerland was accepting (not only jewish) refugees when completely surrounded by Nazis/their allies. We are talking about tiny landlocked country just to be clear. When it would became clear that country can no longer feed its citizens and more incoming refugees, they decided to close the borders("das boot ist voll"), and still one canton - Geneva - said fk you, and keep them coming. Even when it was clear its not sustainable.

My mom's childhood friend who was a Holocaust refugee has no reason to lie to me (about not being able to go to any other country they tried to escape to), I think. But here, I pulled up some sources to placate you guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Jewish_Refugees_Museu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_China

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007091

> China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as "Chinese."

I'm pretty sure this claim is invalid. Say you took a measure of genetic diversity in various populations, I'm pretty sure you would find that Han Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations. Take for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more genetic variation. I think this maps out to just looking at phenotype variation. I have travelled a bit through South East Asia and India, and just looking at visible attributes like skin color, eye color, hair color, and so on, one sees huge variation, also their languages are distinct (not even from a single linguistic family like Sino-Tibetian). In contrast, in China, where I have lived in, I found that the amount of variation was much smaller (just small differences between Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese) which I predict corresponds with much lower genetic diversity and thus the "openness to immigration" is quite suspect.

Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our level of mutual intelligibility is so much higher.

What changed? Standardization (such as printing a standard dictionary) drastically reduced the rate at which languages evolved. And one major historical difference between China and India is a history of unification, starting with the Qin Dynasty, which introduced dictionaries, standardized weights and measures, a single currency, and standard widths of roads. They were brutal in their implementation and it ultimately led to popular revolt, but the standards stuck. However, that would not be the last attempt at unification. In China's history, there have been repeated efforts at unifying an empire, splitting into multiple nations, re-unification, rinse, repeat. Have you noticed that all the terms that translate into "ethnic Chinese" in English are named after dynasties? At one point in time, identifying oneself as "Han" was like saying "I'm an American." Sure, my ancestors are a mix of Wu and Manchurian, but now we're part of the Han Nation. Or a different mix of other ethnicities for the Tang Dynasty.

To put it another way, let's say the EU became one nation that lasted at least a century. People who previously identified as "German" or "Italian" (or Anglos? Saxons? Celts?) all self-identify as European. Fast forward another century. The empire is expanding, and Central Asia is part of the equation now, so European is defined "as opposed to" another group, but another unification event happens, and now everyone on that continent refers to themselves as Eurasian. And sometimes, on the East Coast, there's an influx of Australian immigrants which adds up over the next century. How arbitrary is it to say that Eurasia is 95% Eurasian?

As for visual phenotype difference between Northern and Southern Chinese being "minor" -- these differences look very pronounced to me. Yet I have trouble telling the difference between, say, British and German people, for instance.

Maybe we're just trained on different data sets?

One of the theory on face recognition is that we learn to recognized people by "storing" the difference between an average face and the people we are looking at. And we build that average face from the sum of all people we met.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect

So indeed the different training set has a big impact.

I would also like to offer another data point. The way that Jews were treated in Europe vs in China in the same time period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews

Also, for Muslims, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people

> I'm pretty sure you would find that Han Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations.

Yes, but that's less a function of openness to immigration than the enormous number of native Chinese. The development of rice farming lead to a massive demographic expansion in a very short period of time. It's mostly founder effects.

> Take for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more genetic variation.

You will, but that's more because the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base. Modern Indians (subcontinent, not Republic) are a mix of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian.

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/indians-as-hybrids-a-k-a-aryan-invas...

> the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base

Wouldn't your above statement that China's population is a single base invalidate the OT's statement that China was more open to immigration?

Reading that link and following up on ASI, it looks like this is a truly ancient population set, ie: 3rd oldest after the first or second wave of migration out of Africa and past the Middle East. So it is interesting that this population set merged with numerous other population sets to form all the variation we see in South and South East Asia.

China is not one continuous dynasty. No dynasty lasted as long as the Romans.

The Romans can be said to have two dynasties, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. By the way, the Zhou dynasty lasted 800 years and the Shang dynasty, 1000+.

If we only count the Byzantine Empire, they lasted about ~1100 years (330-1453). Wikipedia says the Shang dynasty lasted only about ~600 years, leaving the Zhou as the longest with their ~800 years. Assuming Wikipedia is correct, the Romans seem to have been more successful.

What's "successful"? If the Romans seem to have been more successful, how does that make you feel, compared to, if someone made a convincing argument the Romans were less successful?

Reading about the Byzantine Empire just now[1], I'd say 476 to 867 was one "dynasty", because in 867 marked the beginning of a Macedonian dynasty, which lasted until 1025. This would break down the Roman empire into dynasties of length not unlike Chinese ones. How do you feel about that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

"More successful" here obviously means that their empire lasted a longer time, since that's what we're discussing. They may have been less successful in other ways. I don't really see what my feelings have to do with the discussion.

The Macedonian Dynasty in the Byzantine isn't quite comparable to Chinese dynasties. In China, a dynasty change, AFAIK, meant that one group overthrew another group and established their own nation, with its own laws and government structures. In Byzantine the change to Macedonian Dynasty happened as a result of internal politics (+ assassination). The nation remained the same; just the guy in charge changed.

Wikipedia says about Shang dynasty that it ruled from around 1600 BC till 1046 BC - that is a little over five hundred yars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty

Not that it isn't impressive or anything, but that isn't a millennium!

Your answer is in this book, The Fate Of Empires. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

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